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LIFE 



Thomas Jefferson. 



THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 



BY 



JAMES PARTON. 




BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

(L.\TE TicKNOR & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 

1874- 



tssz 



r- 

k 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



Boston : 
Stereotyped and Printed by Rand, Avery, & Co. 



iv PEEFACE. 



until a majority of its inhabitants are so far sharers in it 
better civilization, that their v)tes can be obtained by arp- 
ments addressed to the understanding. 

We must now accept it a* an axiom, that universal suf- 
frage, where one-third of thevoters cannot read the lano-uao-e 
of the country they inhabit, ends to place the scoundref clals 
at the summit of affairs. iVe see that it has done so "^ 
France, in the Southern Sttes, in l^ew York, and in Phil 
delphia. 

But such virtue is there n the Jeffersonian methods that 
even in those places, we nd them our best resource. In 
New York, a mass meetir and its Committee of Seventy 
in two years, suppressed t3 worst of the public .stealino-. iJ 
the South, the freedman rjes for the spelling-book. In Penn- 
sylvania, the reign of the £)undrel draws to an ead ; and it is 
everywhere evident, thatothing is farther fron the inten- 
tion of the American peoe -han to submit to lawless or law- 
ful spoliation. 

It is even possible that le prty which Jefferscn founded 

such vitality did he brehe ito it— may again, instructed 
by defeat and purified ithe f rnace of afflictioi, deliver the 
country from the evils ^hichperplex and thr3aten it em- 
ploying the only expediit thi will ever long succeed' in a 
free country, the expediit of ting right. Jefferson's prin- 
ciples will do this, if ts par does not. A government 
simple, inexpensive, anstrong^hat shall protect all ^' ' 
including those of postity, and^t all interests prc^ 
selves, assuming no fu-tions ex^pt those which 
tution distinctly assigr it, — the are the princ 
Jefferson restored in 301, and) which the fu 
country can be safely usted. 

i 



PBEFIOE. 



This volimie originated in thelesire that there should be 

one work upon Jefferson and hittimes within the reach of 

the mass of readers. It was inteded to be smaller than it 

is • but, in spite of a constant efft to be brief, it has grown 

to the propoitions which the reatr sees. For years I have 

wished, in some way, to recall tention to tlie points of 

difference between Jefferson an^his opponents, because I 

think that the best chance of^publican America is an 

adherence to the general line of pities of which he was the 

embodiment. If Jefferson was\Amg, America is wrong. 

If America is right, Jefferson wis rht. 

Nor ouo-ht ve to be impatiet \\h those who assert that 

both America and Jefferson wee W)ng, since we cannot yet 

claim for eithtr a final and indbitile triumph. In Franco 

the politics with which he ws iiDthe warmest sympathy 

resulted in organized massacnandiU Bonaparte; and the 

Hr which h5 led in the Unjd Stes issued, at the South, 

rebellion, and, in soe por)ns of the North, in the 

Thief. We musUce the facts, and understand 

ag. They no I're pr^e that Jefferson and 

ifayette and Paii were rong, than the Inqui- 

ne religious warsi'ove th the maxims of Jesus 

They are only istratio. of the familiar fact, 

progress of truth id justicis slow and very diffi- 

ley show that no^untry itipe for equal rights 



y 



OOI^TEJSrTS. 



Chapter. Page. 

I. — Colonel Peter Jefferson 1 

n.— The Mother of Jefferson 5 

m.— Our Jefferson's Childhood 9 

IV. — Jefferson's School-life 15 

V. — He goes to College 19 

VI.— At College 26 

. VII. — Jefferson in Love 34 

Viii. — Coming of Age 41 

IX.— TheLaw-stndent 46 

X. — Stamp-act Scenes 63 

XI. —Lawyers in Old Virginia 70 

XII. —A Member of the Virginia Legislature 85 

Xm. — His Marriage 99 

XTV. — An Affair in Narragansett Bay 109 

XV. — The Effect in Virginia and Elsewhere 120 

XVI. — Jefferson gives Advice to George ni 134 

XVn.— The Congress 143 

XVm. — Hostilities precipitated by the Eoyal Governors . . . 151 

XIX. — Jefferson in the Continental Congress 163 

XX — In Vii-giuia again 172 

XXI. — The Declaration of Independence 179 

XXH. — Jefferson named Envoy to France 195 

XXHr. —Need of Eeform in Old Vu-ginia 199 

XXIV. — Jefferson, Wythe, and Madison begin the Work of Reformation 207 

XXV.— Fii-st Three Years of the War 220 

XXVI. — Jefferson Governor of Virginia 225 

XXVn.— Virginia Ravaged 240 

XXVin.— The Enemy at MonticeUo 250 

XXIX. —At Home after the War 257 

XXX. —Death of IMrs. Jefferson 265 

XXXI. — In Congress at Annapolis 268 

XXXU.— Envoy to France 277 



VI pONTENTS. 

CHArTEK. Tif3K. 

XXXIII. — First Impressions of Europe 285 1 

XXXIV.— The Work of Ms Mission 291 j 

XXXV.— Unofficial Labors 303| 

XXXVI.— His Travels in Europe 312I 

XXXVIL— Jefferson and tLe French devolution 818| 

XXXVm.—Pteturning to the United States 3301 

XXXIX.— His Welcome Home 342 

XL. — Alexander Hamilton 349 

XLL— Tone of New-York Society in 1790 364 

XLH. —The Cabinet of President Washington . , . . .376 

XLin.— The New Government and the Public Debt .... 384 

XXIV. —Jefferson settling to his Work 398 

XLV. — Negotiations with England after the Revolution . . . 402 

XLVI. — The French Revolution in American PoUtics . . . 417 

XL'VTI. —The Quarrel of Jefferson aid Hamilton 430 

XLVni. — Causes of his Desire to resign ....... 451 

XLIX. — Genet coming . . .1 461 

L. — Edmund Genet in the Unitqd States 469 

LI. — Jefferson resigns, and retii-es to Monticello . . - . . 491 

LII. — Arrival of Dr. Priestley in the United States .... 496 

LTEI. — Jefferson as a Farmer 501 

LrV. — Candidate for the Presidency 609 

LV. — Elected Vice-president 524 

LVI. -7- Hamilton's Amour with Mrs. Reynolds 532 

LVn. —The Grand Embassy to France in 1797 540 

LVill. — Hamilton improves the Opportunity 550 

LIX.— The Campaign Lies of 1800 567 

LX. — The Tie between Jefferson and Burr 576 

LXI. — The First Republican Administration 583 

LXn.— Jefferson President 604 

LXin.— The Algerine Piracies 636" 

LXrV. — Louisiana purchased 641 

LXV. — Downfall of Aaron Burr 657 

LXVI.— The Embargo 671 

LXVn. — Correspondence with Mrs. Adams 678 

LXV ill. — Retirement from the Presidency 683 

LXix.— At Monticello 687 

LXX. — His Labors to promote Education 700 

LXXI. — Visitors at Monticello, and Family Reminiscences . . 714 

LXXn. — Last Years and Days 727 

LXXTTT. —Summary 737 



LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 



CHAPTER I. 

COLONEL PETER JEFFERSON. 

JEFFERSON was a stripling of seventeen, tall, raw-boned, 
freckled, and sandy-haired, when, in 1760, he came to Wil- 
liamsburg, from the Far West of Virginia, to enter the College of 
William and Mary. With his large feet and hands, his thick 
wrists, and prominent cheek-bones and chin, he could not have been 
accounted handsome or graceful. He is described, however, as a 
fresh, bright, healthy-looking youth, as straight as a gun-barrel, 
sinewy and strong, with that alertness of movement which comes 
of early familiarit}'' with saddle, gun, canoe, minuet, and contra- 
dance, — that sure, elastic tread, and ease of bearing, which we still 
observe in country-bred lads who have been exempt from the ruder 
toils of agriculture, while enjoying in fidl measure the freedom and 
the sports of the country. His teeth, too, were perfect, which alone 
redeems a countenance destitute of other charm. His eyes, which 
were of hazel-gray, were beaming and expressive ; and his de^ 
meanor gave assurance of a gentle heart, and a sympathetic, 
inquisitive mind. 

Such lads, eager and unformed, still come to college from honest 
country homes, in regions where agriculture is carried on upon a 
scale that allows some leisure to the farmer's family, some liberality 
of expenditure, books, music, a tincture of art, and hospitable 
habits. How welcome, how dear, to instructors worthy of them, 
are such unhackneyed minds in bodies unimpaired ! 



2 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

The abode of this j^outh was a hundred and fifty miles to the 
nortli-west of Williamsburg, among the mountains of Central Vir- 
ginia, near where the Eiver Eivanna, an important tributary, enters 
the James. His home was a plain, spacious farm-house, a story and 
a half high, with four large rooms and a wide entry on the ground- 
floor, and many garret chambers above. The farm was nineteen 
hundred acres of land, part of it densely wooded, and some of it so 
steep and rocky as to be unfit for cultivation. The fields near the 
river were strong land, not yet (though soon to be) worn past the 
profitable culture of tobacco; but the upper portions were well 
suited to the grains and roots familiar to the farmers of the Middle 
States. For sixty years the staple product of all that fine mountain 
region, witli its elevated fields, its far-reaching valleys, and rapid 
streams, was wheat ; which the swift tributaries ground into flour, 
and the yellow James bore down its tranquil tide to Eichmond, 
distant from the Jefferson home two 'days' ride. The rustle of 
wheat-ears was familiar music to Thomas Jefferson from infancy to 
hoary age. 

The farm was tilled at this period by thirty slaves, — equivalent 
to about fifteen farm-hands. The circumstances of the family were 
easy, not afiiuent. Almost every common thing they consumed was 
grown or made at home, — all the common fabrics and ordinary 
clothing: and of home-made commodities they had an abundance : 
but the thirty pounds sterling per annum in cash, which the student 
was to expend at Williamsburg for his board and tuition, was not so 
• light a charge upon the estate as it sounds to us. The entire 
expense of his maintenance away from home may have been fifty 
pounds a year ; which was, probably, not less than half the sum that 
could be taken properly from the annual product of the farm and 
shops, after all the home charges had been paid. , The yeomen of 
Virginia, though they enjo3red a profusion of the necessaries of life, 
w^ere sometimes sorely put to it when a sum of money was to be 
raised. 

This student of seventeen, through the death of his father three 
years before, was already the head of the family, and, under a guar- 
dian, the owner of the Shadwell Farm, the best portion of his 
father's estate. 

The happy results that spnng from the intermingling, by mar-, 
riage, of families long cultured with families more vigorous and less 



COLONEL PETER JEFFERSON. 3 

refined, lias been often remarked. Sucli conjunctions ghve us 
Shakspeare and Goethe. A novelist of the day tells us of a ducal 
house, which, on system, married a plebeian estate every other gen- 
eration, which renewed at once its blood and its fortunes. The 
material point was the renewal of the blood, which brings with it 
the brain, the stamina/ and the self-control by which great houses 
are founded, and all grfeat things are done. If at the present time 
there is an aristocracy in Europe, which, iii any respectable degree, 
earns its wages, it is that aristocracy which has oftenest renewed 
itself by the strenuous blood of men who have won commanding 
places by sheer strength of mind and purpose. The world would 
never have heard of the Palmerstons, if the second lord had not won 
the admirable daughter of a Dublin tradesman; nor of Brougham, 
if the father of the late lord had married, as he intended, in his 
native country and class. Nature so delights in uniting opposites, 
that she seals with the unmistakable signet of her approbation the 
coming-together of opposites artificially produced, — ancient culture 
and unlettered force. 

Peter Jefferson, the father of the student, was a superb specimen 
of a class, nearly extinct in Great Britain, which used to be called 
yeomen, — farmers who owned the soil they tilled, but had no pre- 
tensions to aristocratic rank, — a class intermediate- in a parish 
between the squire and his tenants. In old Virginia, yeomen were 
farmers, who, beginning life with little capital besides a strong arm 
and an energetic will, had taken up a tract of land to the westward 
of the great tobacco-region of Virginia, and gradually worked their 
way to the possession of a cleared farm, and a few families of slaves. 
In this manner Peter Jefferson, and his father before him, had 
achieved an independent position : stanch both, of strong self-tutored 
sense, and of signal ability in the conduct of business; enterprising 
and methodical; liberal, but exact; good at figures, with a clear, 
careful handwriting, and an aptitude for mechanics. The family was 
of Welsh extraction. The first of the name in Virginia, it is well 
worth noting, was a member of that Virginia Assembly of 1610, the O 
first legislative body ever convened on the western continent, the 
summoning of which ended the twelve years' anarchy that followed 
the planting of the colony, and notified the colonists, that, in crossing 
the sea, they had lost none of the rights of Englishmen. All that 
is important, characteristic, and hopeful, in the history of America, 



4 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

dates' from the meeting of that Assembly ; and an ancestor of 
Thomas Jefferson was a member of it. Virginia then contained 
six hundred white inhabitants. The church nearest his farm was 
called the ''Jefferson Cburch" for a hundred years after his death, 
and tlie ruins of it were visible as late as 1856. 

Peter Jefferson, a younger son, and therefore having little to 
expect from his father, made his entrance into responsible life by 
the door which, many years later, admitted the son of another Vir- 
ginia yeoman, George Washington. He learned the art of survey- 
ing laud, — a hind of liberal jirofession in a new country. He 
practised this profession in his native county of Chesterfield, and in 
all the region trodden by Confederate armies and torn by Federal 
cannon during the long siege of Richmond and Petersburg, — cities 
which then existed only in the prophetic minds of men like Colonel 
Byrd, who marked both as the sites of towns when as yet not a 
tree of the primeval forest had been felled. Like George Washing- 
ton, too, this young surveyor owed his rise in the social scale to a 
marriage ; though it was Peter Jefferson's happier fortune to win 
a maiden heart, and to create for her the home over which he asked 
her to preside. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE MOTHER OF JEFFEKSOIST, 

What a pretty romance it was ! The athletic j^outli, master of 
his surveyor's chain and knowledge, a natural prince of the frontier, 
becomes knit in an ardent, young man's friendship with William 
Randolph, sou of one of those flourishing Randolphs who lived in 
such lordly state, in the good old barbaric days, when the soil of 
Virginia was still unworn, when negroes were twenty-five guineas 
"a head," and tobacco brought four pence a pound in London 
docks. Together they visit an uncle of William Randolph, seated 
on a vast plantation on the James, some miles below the mouth of 
the Rivanna, — one of the few grand houses of Virginia wherein, 
knowledge and taste were more conspicuous than pride and pro- 
fusion. Isham Randolph was the name of this tobacco lord, and 
his eldest daughter was Jane. She was born while the family were 
living in London, where her father knew Peter Collinson, wool- 
merchant, botanist, and friend of Pennsylvania ; also Hans Sloane, 
founder of the British Museum, and all that circle of the Royal 
Societj'^'s more active members. 

She was not too lightly won, this daughter of a stately house. 
Peter Jefferson was twenty-eight, and she seventeen, when he 
mounted and rode a hundred miles to the northwest of his home, 
and fifty miles beyond hers, and bought his first thousand acres on 
the Rivanna, and began to hew out a farm and home. Within half a 
day's ride, the smoke of only three or four settlers' cabins floated up 
through small clearings to the sky, and the trail of Indians was to be 
seen in the woods. For two years he wrought there in the forest, 
aided, doubtless, by a slave family or two ; and when he had cleared a 
few fields, and built something a little better than a cabin, he went 
to DungenesSj and brought home his bride, Jane Randolph. To do 

6 



b LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIS". 

her honor, he named their abode Shadwel], because it was in a Lon- 
don parish of that name that she first saw the light. He was 
married in 1738. Five years after, — April 13^ 1743, — his third 
child was born, whom he named Thomas, that student who stands 
at the threshold of William and IMarj College, waiting our conven- 
ience to be admitted. 

Of this adventurous lady, who gave her hand to Peter Jefferson 
and rode by his side to their home in the woods, we only know that 
she was the child of an intelligent and hospitable father; and this 
one fact comes to ixs by a strange and pleasant chance. There 
was a Quaker farmer near Philadelphia, at the beginning of the 
last ♦century, named John Bartram, who, while he was resting 
from the plough one day, under a tree, pulling a daisy to pieces, 
and observing some of the more obvious marvels of its construction, 
suddenly awoke to his pitiful, ignorance of the vegetable wonders in 
the midst of which he had lived and labored from childhood. He 
resumed his toil, but not with that stolid content with his ignorance 
that he had enjoyed so long. On the fourth day after, raging for 
knowledge, he hired a man to hold his plough, while he rode to 
Philadelphia, and brought home a work upon botany in Latin, and 
a Latin grammar. In three months, by a teacher's aid, he. could 
grope his way in the Latin book ; in a year he had botanized all over 
the region round about, and cast longing eyes over the border into 
Maryland and Virginia. By good management of his farm and 
servants, — emancipated slaves, — he was able to spend the rest of 
his life in the stndy of Nature, making wide excursions into neigh- 
boring colonies, until he knew every plant that grew between the 
Alleghany range and the Atlantic Ocean; becoming at length 
botanist to the king, at fifty guineas a year, and founding on the 
banks of the Schuylkill the first botanical garden of America. He 
and his garden flourished together to a green old age; and he died, 
at the approach of the British army during the Eevolutionarj^ War, 
of terror lest the pride of his life should be trampled into ruin by 
the troops. Among his European correspondents was that assidu- 
ous friend of Pennsylvania and of Franklin, Peter Collinson, with 
whom for fifty years he exchanged letters, seeds, roots, trees, slips, 
nuts, grafts, birds, turtles, squirrels, and other animals ; and it is to 
their correspondence that Europe owes the profusion of American 
trees and shrubs that adorn so many parks, gardens, and highways. 



THE MOTHER OF JEFFERSON. 7 

To the same interchange America was indebted, among otiier bene- 
fits, for those rare kinds of plums, cherries, apricots, gooseberries, 
and other fruits, that flourished for a time, though tlie clijnate lias 
since proved too harsh and exacting for them. In a sihgularly 
quiet, homely waj?-, those two excellent men, at the cost of a few 
guineas per annum, conferred solid and lasting benefits upon count- 
less generations of the inhabitants of two continents. 

It is in the letters of Peter Collinson to his American friend, that 
we find allusions to the father of our Jefferson's mother. William 
Bartram may have seen Peter Jefferson and Jane Randol[)h mar- 
ried ; for a few months before that event, when the botanist was 
about to make a botanical tour in Virginia, Collinsoa sends him the 
names of three or four gentlemen of that province who were inter- 
ested in " our science," one of whom was Isham Randolph. " jSTo 
one," he remarks, "will make tliee more welcome;" and he adds, 
"I take his house to be a very suitable place to make a settlement 
at, for to take several days' excursions all round, and to return to his 
house at night." The worthy Quaker favors his somewhat too plain 
American friend, who was also of Quaker family, with a piece of ad- 
vice, that gives us some information. "One thing," he sa3''s, "I 
must desire of thee, and do insist that thee oblige me therein : that 
thou make up that drugget clothes " (a present from Collinson to 
Bartram), "to go to Virginia in, and not appear to disgrace thyself 
or me ; for, though I should not esteem thee less to come to me in 
what dress thou will, yet these Virginians " (having in his mind's 
eye his old acquaintances, Isham Randolph and his young family-) 
'•' are a very gentle, well-dressed people, and look, perhaps, more at a 
man's outside than his inside. For these and other reasons, pray go 
very clean, neat, and handsomely dressed, in Virginia. Never mind 
thy clothes : I will send more another time." The benevolent Peter 
was a dealer in woollens, and sent the rustic Bartram many a good 
ell of cloth to wear at the great houses in the country. 

The botanist visited Isham Randolph's mansion on the James, in 
and about which, it is said, a hundred servants attended. There he 
must have seen the eldest daughter of the house at the time when 
she was busy with preparations for her marriage ; and he may have 
staid to the wedding-feast, and cheered the bride and bridegroom 
as they rode away on horseback to their new home. He had gen- 
erous entertainment, of which he sent grateful accounts to his pa- 



8 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

tron in London. Collinson replies, that it was no more than he 
expected of his friend Isham : " I did not doubt his civility to thee. 
I only wish to have been there, and shared it with thee." In anoth- 
er letter, the worthy merchant mentions that "onr friend, Isham 
Kandolph (a generous, good-natured gentleman, and well respected 
by most who are acquainted with him) " had agreed to correspond 
with him on their beloved science. When the news came of Isham 
Randolph's death, Collinson wrote of him as *' the good man " who 
had gone to his long home, and, he doubted not, was happy. 

These glimpses of the father of Jefiferson's mother are slight, but 
they are the more interesting because they confirm the tradition that 
it was from his mother he derived his temper, his disposition, and 
his sympathy with living nature. 



CHAPTER III. 

OUR Jefferson's childhood. 

Though his mother had been the teiiderest of women, his father 
had strength to match her tenderness. Tradition, current in the 
county where he lived, and gathered by Mr. Randall, whose exten- 
sive and sympathetic work * must remain tlie great reservoir of 
information respecting the JefFersons, reports Peter Jefferson a 
wonder of physical force and stature. He had the strength of 
three strong men. Two hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing a 
thousand pounds, he could raise at once from their sides, and stand 
them upright. When surveying in the wilderness, he could tire out 
his assistants, and tire out his mules ; then eat his mules, and still 
press on, sleeping alone by "iiight in a hollow tree, to the howling of 
the wolves, till his task was done. He loved mathematics. He 
managed his affairs so well, that, in twenty years, he was master of 
a competent estate, and could assign a good plantation to his 
younger son, after leaving the bulk of his estate to his eldest. But 
with this strength of character there was genuine intelligence. He 
relished Shakspeare ; and Shakspeare alone can be a liberal edu- 
cation. His fine edition of Shakspeare, still preserved among his 
relics, attests, by its appearance, that the man whose property it was 
loved it, and repaired often to it during many years for solace and 
delight. The Spectator, a new work in his day, and some volumes 
of Swift, are among the books, once his, that his descendants pos- 
sess. 

County honors, which at that time and place could mean nothing 
but public duties, always difficult, often perilous, never compensated, 
made him at length the tinquestioned chief of the frontier region. 

* The Life of Tliomas Jefferson, by Henry S. Randall, LL.D. Three vols. New York, 
1853. 

9 



10 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

When the county was set off and named Albemarle, Peter Jefferson 
was appointed one of its three justices of the peace ; afterwards 
county surveyor; then colonel of the county, chief of provincial 
honors in old Virginia, in which capacity he was the defender of 
the frontier against the Indians ; finally he was sent to represent 
his county in the House of Burgesses, which sat at Williamsburg, the 
capital of the Province. In politics he was a British Whig, like 
most of the Western yeomen of the early day ; the great planters 
of the lower country generally affecting Tory politics. For many 
years he was vestryman of his parish church. 

His qualifications were recognized by the royal government. He 
was out, when his boy was six years old, for several weeks, on the 
line between Virginia and North Carolina, as joint commissioner 
with Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics in William and Mary 
College, completing the boundary between these two Provinces. 
Two years after, he was associated with Professor Fry in the con- 
struction of the first map of Virginia ever attempted since Captain 
John Smith's conjectural sketch of 1609. The boy of eight must 
have seen tlie surveys and broad sheets spread upon the great table 
in tlie family room. Perhaps this honorable connection with one of 
the college professors may have strengthened, may have originated, 
the fondest purpose of Peter Jefferson's heart, which was to give his 
son the best chance for education the colony afforded. 

From this natural chief of men, Thomas Jefferson derived his 
stature, his erectness, his bodily strength, — in which only his father 
excelled him of all the men known or remembered in that county, 
— his self-reliance, his habit of waiting upon himself, his aversion 
to parade and ceremony, his tendency to humane politics, his curious 
exactness in matters of business, his strong bias toward mathemat- 
ics, mechanics, and architecture. He may have derived from him, 
too, some traits that limited his ability as an executive chief. One 
of his father's maxims was, "Never ask another to do for you what 
you can do for yourself." A man who has to direct extensive affairs, 
and control many men, must reverse this maxim, and never do any 
thing himself which he can properly get another to do. 

We can hardly imagine a boy better placed for the equal develop- 
ment of mind, body, and character, than Thomas Jefferson was 
during his father's lifetime. That region combines both the charms 
and the advantages of mountain and plain ; for the heights are not 



OUR Jefferson's childhood. 11 

too difficult for access, and the lowlands are not insalubrious. He 
could shoot wild turkeys, deer, and all flying garae, without going 
off his father's estate; and past his native fields flowed a river, over 
which he was early taught to swim his horse. The primeval wilder- 
ness covered the mountains, and waved luxuriant in many a valley, 
the most conspicuous fact of nature around him till he was long past 
boyhood. But by the time he was a well-grown lad, there were 
neighbors near and numerous enough for society. His father's 
official position made him the arbiter between contentious men, and 
the minister of justice. The lad must have seen his father try 
man}' a petty case, and settle many a difference, as well between 
white men as between wliites and Indians. 

That liking for Indians, which we observe in the writings of 
Jeff"erson, resulted from his earfy acquaintance with some of the best 
of the uncorrupted chiefs, who used to visit and stay with his father 
on their journeys to and from the capital of Virginia. The Indians 
held his father in that entire respect which they were apt to feel for 
men who never feared and never deceived them. One of the most 
vivid recollections of his boyhood was of a famous chief of the 
Cherokees, named Ontassete, who Avent to England on behalf of his 
people. The boy was in the camp of this chief the evening before 
his departure for England, and heard him deliver his farewell ora- 
tion to his tribe, — a scene that he used to describe with animation 
seventy years after its occurrence. ■ The moon was in full splendor 
that evening ; and it seemed as if it was to that lustrous orb the 
impassioned orator addressed prayers for his own safety, and the 
protection of his people during his absence. The powerful voice of 
the speaker, his distinct articulation, his animated gesture, and the- 
silence of the listening Indians sitting motionless in groups by their 
several fires, filled him with awe and veneration, although he did 
not understand a word that was spoken. 

All the important circumstances of his home come to mind as we 
brood over scattered indications in old and new Virginia books. We 
see that giant of a father, steadfast, reserved, even austere, but not 
ungentle, busy with official labors and the details of farm and barn 
during the day, and in the evening giving his boy (his only son 
for many years) lessons in book-keeping and arithmetic; two elder 
sisters, perhaps, taking their turn at slate and pencil, or sitting with 
their mother plying the needle : the father not uufrequently, treat- 



12 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

in g the gronp to a favorite paper from tlie Spectator. The morn- 
ing scene, too, with the mother and her servants, we can infer with, 
much probability from descriptions of similar interiors preserved 
from that period. 

Deeply as Jefferson came to hate slavery, clearly as he foretold 
the ruin enclosed in the system, he saw it only in its better aspects 
at his own home. He saw his father patiently drilling negroes, not 
long from their native Africa, into carpenters, millers, wheelrights, 
shoemakers, and farmers. He saw his mother of a morning in her 
sitting-room, which was well furnished with contrivances for facili- 
tating labor, seated with her daughters and her servants, like An- 
dromache surrounded by her maidens, all busy with household tasks. 
We possess authority' for the picture. Have we not been favored 
with a glimpse of Mrs. Wasliington's "morning-room at Mount Ver- 
non, — that room which was so " nicely fixed for all sorts of work" ? 
'•' On one side sits the chambermaid with her knitting ; on the other, 
a little colored pet, learning to sew. An old, decent woman was 
there with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes' winter 
clothes, while the good old lady directs them all, incessantly knit- 
ting herself. She points out to me several pairs of nice colored 
stockings and gloves she had just finished, and presents me with a 
pair half done, which she begs I will finish and wear for her sake." 
Bishop Meade, who quotes this interesting passage from an old Vir- 
ginia manuscript, adds that, in other houses (like the home of the 
Jeffersons) less opulent and containing many children, the mother 
would have her daughters with her in the same apartment, one spin- 
ning, another basting, another winding yarn, another churning, — 
all vigorousl}'- at work : for at that day a plantation was obliged to 
be nearly self-supplying ; and the family at the great house had to do 
the thinking, contriving, cutting, and doctoring for a family of as 
many helpless, improvident children as there were slaves. 

In such a bus}^, healthy home as this, with father, mother, two 
elder sisters, four younger sisters, and a little brother, Thomas Jef- 
ferson lived in his boyhood. He was happy in his eldest sister, 
Jane, whose mind was akin to his own. She was his confidant and 
companion, and shared his taste for the arts, particularly his early 
love of music. The family were all reared and baptized in the 
Church of England ; and this sister greatly excelled in singing the 
fcAV fine old psalra-tunes which then coustitated the whole psalmody 



oiTR Jefferson's childhood. 13 

of the Protestant world. For a century, it is said, there were hut 
five tunes sung in the colonial churches. By the fireside in the 
winter evenings, and on the banks of their river in the soft, summer 
twilight, there were family singings, Jane Jefferson's melodious 
voice leading the choir ; to which was added, as the years went on, 
the accompaniment of her brother's violin. There must have been 
much musical feeling in the family to have generated in this boj'' so 
profound a passion for music as he exhibited. He speaks of three 
early tastes as "the passion of his soul," — music, mathematics, 
and architecture ; and. of these the one first developed was music. 

The massive instruments with which we are familiar — the piano 
and the organ — would have been unattaitiable in a Virginia farm- 
house at that period, even if they had been sufficiently perfected to 
warrant transportation so far. The violin, called by its old-fashioned 
name of the fiddle, king of instruments, was almost the only one 
generally known in the back countries of the colonies. In Vir- 
ginia, when Jefferson and Patrick Henry were merry lads together, 
both of whom played the fiddle, it appears that almost every farm- 
house which had a boy in it could boast a fiddle also. Mr. Kives, in 
his *' Life of Madison," among many other precious things, pre- 
serves the programme of the rustic festivities arranged for St. 
Andrew's Day in 1737, in the next county but one to Jefferson's, 
Albemarle. It throws light on his early violin, besides showing 
how English the tone of Virginia was at that period. 

First, twenty horses were to run round a three-mile course for a 
prize of five pounds, no one " to put up a horse unless he had sub- 
scribed for the entertainment and paid half a pistole." Next, a hat 
of the value of twenty shillings was to be cudgelled for. Then, a 
violin was to be played for by twenty fiddlers, — "no person to have 
the liberty of playing, unless he bring a fiddle with him." When 
the prize had been awarded, all the performers were to play together, 
each a different tune, and to be treated by the company. Next, 
twelve boys, twelve j'^ears of age, were to run a hundred and twelve 
yards for a hat worth twelve shillings. A " quire of ballads were to 
be sung for by a number of songsters, all of them to have liquor 
sufficient to clear their windpipes." A pair of silver buckles was to 
be wrestled for by " a number of brisk young men." " A pair of 
handsome shoes " was to be "danced for." A pair of handsome silk 
stockings of one pistole value was to be given to " the handsomest 



14 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

yonng country maid that appears in the field." A "handsome 
entertainment " was also to be provided for the subscribers and their 
wives ; " and such of them as are not so happy as to have wives 
may treat any other lady." Drums, trumpets, and hautboj's were 
to play ; and, at the feast, the healths of the king and of the gover- 
nor were to be drunk. The programme concluded by notifying the 
public, that, "as this mirth is designed to be purely innocent and 
void of offence, all persons resorting to these are desired to behave 
themselves with decency and sobriety ; the subscribers being re- 
solved to discountenance all immorality with the utmost rigor." 

The prominence assigned to the violin contest in these festivities 
explains the frequent allusions to it in the early memorials of Vir- 
ginia, and lessens our surprise at Jefferson's statement, that, daring 
twelve years of his early life, he practised on the violin three hours 
a day. The innocent instrument, it appears, had an ill name among 
the stricter religious people of the mountain counties, where " evan- 
gelical " principles prevailed. Our zealous young amateur may have 
heard a sermon once preached in a parish church near his home by 
Kev. Charles Clay, — cousin of the eloquent Kentuckian, — in 
which the preacher warned his hearers against the " profanation " 
of Christmas Day by " fiddling, dancing, drinking, and such like ; " 
practices, he said, which were only too common in Albemarle. 
Then, as now, it was the drink that did the mischief, though the 
fiddle and the dance had to share the blame. 



CHAPTEE IV. 
jeffekson's school-life. ^ 

Peter Jeffersox began early to execute his heartfelt intention 
of educating his son. This was not so difficult as has been repre- 
sented. Twenty years before the child was born, the Bishop of 
London, in whose diocese Virginia was, addressed certain questions 
to the Virginian clergy. One of the questions was, " Are there any 
schools in your parish ? " All the clergymen, except two or three, 
answered, '■'■ ISTone ; " and the two or three who did not make this 
answer could only claim that their parishes had '• a charitj' school." 
Another question was, " Is there any parish library ? " To this, all 
the clergy, except one man, answered, " iSTone ; " and that one man 
made this replj', " We have the Book of Homilies, the Whole Duty 
of Man, and the Singing Psalms." But, by the time Jefferson was 
old enougli to go to school, there were a few schools in tlie more 
densely peopled counties of Virginia ; and several of the more learned 
and decent of the clergy received pupils into their houses for instruc- 
tion in Latin and Greek. 

He was fortunate in his ' teachers, as in all things else. At five 
he went to a school where only the English language was emplo^yed ; 
at nine his education seriously began, when he entered a Scottish 
clergyman's family as a boarding scholar, where he learned Latin, 
Greek, and French. Entries in Peter Jefferson's account-book, still 
existing, show that he paid the Rev, William Douglass sixteen \ 
pounds sterling a year for his son's board and tuition. Tliis first / 
instructor of Thomas Jefferson came over from Scotland as tutor in 
the famil}' of Colonel Monroe, father of President Monroe, and set- 
tling on the James, near Peter Jefferson's tobacco plantation, spent 
a long life in teaching young and old. Ho was of what we now call 
the " evangelical " school, and regarded Dr. Doddridge's works as 

15 



16 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

more precious than gold, — " the best legacy " he could leave his chil- 
dren. Peter Jefferson was a vestryman of his church. The boy 
was evidently much at home during the five years he spent at this 
school, — always, probably, on Saturdays and Sundays ; and his 
father took care that the boy did not neglect a child's first and chief 
duty, which is to grow. He also instructed him in arithmetic and the 
rudiments of mathematics, then generall}^ neglected in classical schools. 

But this excellent father was not destined to experience the no- 
blest triumph parents know, — that of seeing his child a full-formed 
man, and better equipped for life's journey than himself had been at 
starting. His great strength did not avail to bring him to old age. 
In 1757, when he was but fifty years old, he died of a disease not 
recorded. 

After Braddock's defeat, in 1755, there could have been little rest for 
such a colonel of a frontier county as he was ; and, indeed, there are 
indications — paj'-rolls and other military documents and entries — 
among his existing papers, showing that he was active against the ex- 
ulting foe. JSTothiag was heard of for a time on the borders but mas- 
sacre and fire, and the flight of whole counties of settlers to the lower 
country. It is of this period, in the midst of which Colonel Jefferson 
died, that the youthful commander of the Virginian forces. Colonel 
Wasliington, wrote that despatch from the frontier which startles every 
reader of his letters by its burst of vehement pathos. " The sup- 
plicating tears of the women and moving petitions of the men," he 
wrote, " melt me with such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, 
if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to 
the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the peo- 
ple's ease." The county colonels were all in arms during that time 
of terror. Colonel John Madison, in Orange, the next county to 
Albemarle, and nearer the scene, saw some of the horrors of the war 
from his own front door. His son James, four years old at the time 
of Braddock's defeat, always remembered the terror and desolation 
of the two next years. Exposure and fatigue may have rendered 
the colonel of Albemarle County liable to the attack of one of the 
summer diseases, for it was on the 17th of August that he died. 

His death is spoken of as sudden ; but this good father, it seems, 
had time and strength, sudden as his death may have been, to 
render his eldest son one last service. Dying, he left an injunction 
that his sou's education should be completed, and enjoined those in 



Jefferson's school-life. 17 

whose charge he was to be, not to permit him to neglect the exer- 
cises requisite for his body's development. This strong man valued 
strength. He used to say that the weakly in body could not be in- 
dependent in mind; and, therefore, among his dying thoughts was 
solicitude for his son's healthy, unchecked growth. He died leaving 
his wife still young, not quite forty ; one daughter seventeen ; an- 
other sixteen ; his son Thomas fourteen ; another daughter thir- 
teen ; another eleven ; another five ; and a boy and girl, twins, aged 
twenty-two months. To the end of his days, Jefferson spoke of his 
father, thus early lost, with pride and veneration ; and he especially 
loved to think that his dying command was that his sou's mind 
should not be wronged of its due culture and nourishment. He 
used to say, that, if he had to choose between the education or the 
estate his father gave him, he would choose the education. 

His father's death left him his own master ; for he says in one of 
his later letters, that, "at fourteen years of age the whole care and 
direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a rela- 
tion or friend qualified to advise or guide me." The first use he 
made of his liberty was to change his school. 

Fourteen miles away was the parsonage of Rev. James Maury, a 
man of great note in his time, and noted for many things ; from 
whose twelve children have descended a great number of estimable 
persons of the name still living. Of Huguenot descent and gen- 
uine scholarship, he was free both from the vices and the bigotry 
which the refuse of the young English clergy often brought with 
them to Virginia in the early time. Pamphlets of his remain, main- 
taining the right and liberal side of questions bitterly contested in 
his day. He was one of the clergymen of the Established Church 
in Virginia who opposed, with voice and pen, that senseless persecu- 
tion of Dissenters, which at last brought the Church itself to ruin. 
He went so far as to say, in a printed address, that he should feel it 
an " honor and happiness " to promote the spiritual good of " any 
one honest and well-disposed person of whatever persuasion ; " and, 
though he preferred his own church, he thought he saw errors in it, 
as well as in the other sects, and should be glad to assist in the cor- 
rection and improvement of both / 

The coming of this clergyman into the mountain region, about 
the time of Jefferson's birth, was evidently a welcome event ; for a 
glebe of four hundred acres was at once set off for him, and so spa- 
2 



18 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

cious a par?!onage was built, that he was able to add to his own large 
family some pupils from the adjacent counties. By the time Jef- 
ferson was fourteen, an important school had grown up about him, — 
the best, it is thought, then existing in the Province ; and it con- 
tinued to flourish, under one of Mr. Maury's sons, as late as the 
year 1808, when one of its pupils was President of a nation which 
the founder of the school did not live to see established. 

We do not know what Jefferson read in Latin and Greek during 
the two years that he remained at Mr. Maury's school ; but we know 
that he learned nothing but Latin and Greek. A classmate and an 
associate of his at this school was the second son of the master, also 
named James ; to whom Mr. Jefferson, when Secretary of Stare un- 
der President Washington, gave the Liverpool consuls]) ip, which he 
held for forty-five years. The consul, on his return to Virginia in 
old age, used to say that Jefferson was noted at his father's school 
for scholarship, industry, and shyness. If a holiday was desired, it 
was not he who could be induced to ask it, though he urged others 
to ask ; and, if the request was granted, he would, first of all, with- 
draw from the noisy crowd of his schoolfellows, learn next day's 
lesson, and then, rejoining them, begin the day's pleasure. Their 
favorite diversion was hunting on a mountain near by, which then 
and long after abounded in deer, turkeys, foxes, and other game. 
He was a keen hunter, as eager after a fox as Washington himself, 
swift of foot and sound of wind, coming in fresh and alert after a 
long day's clambering hunt. 

After two years' stay at this school, he began, like other students, 
to be impatient to enter college. He had never j^et seen a town, 
nor even a village of twenty houses, for there was none such within 
his range ; and he doubtless had the curiosity of youth to behold 
the glories of the capital. He found plenty of reasons for gratify- 
ing his wish, some of which he laid before his guardian. He lost a 
fourth of his time, he said, by company coming to Shadwell and 
detaining him from school, which added very much to the expenses 
of the estate in housekeeping. At the college, too, he could learn 
"'something of mathematics," as well as the languages, and " could, 
get a more universal acquaintance, which may hereafter be service- 
able to me." His guardian consenting, he bade fore well to his 
mother and sisters, and set oft", early in the spring of 17G0, for 
Williamsburgh, five days' long ride from his home. 



CHAPTER V. 



HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 



It was not the custom of this young gentleman, nor of Virgini- 
ans generally then, to perform their journeys with straightforward 
rapidity. They took friends' houses on the way, were easily per- 
suaded to remain over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and made the 
most of the opportunity. Such was eminently the hahit of 3'oung 
Jefferson, related as he was to half the families of the Province, and 
seldom going far from home without his fiddle, and perhaps a roll 
of "new minuets" from London, so welcome to j'oung ladies in the 
remoter counties. It was always impressed on his memory, that he 
began this interesting journey before Christmas, and staid over for 
the holidays at a merry house in Hanover County, where he met, for 
the first time, a jovial blade named Patrick Henry, only noted then 
for fiddling, dancing, mimicry, and practical jokes. He was mis- 
taken, however. An existing letter of the time shows that he had 
not thought of going to college till after Christmas, and did not con- 
sult his guardian on the subject till January was half gone. He 
probably spent the holidays with Patrick Henry, returned home, 
and then entered upon the project of going to college. But it was 
always his custom, in his journeys to and from Williamsburg, to 
make long visits to friends on and near the road ; and it was this, 
perhaps, that led to the error. He remembered the future orator 
merely as the prime mover of all the fun of the younger circle, and 
had not a suspicion of the wonderful talent that lay undeveloped 
within him. As little, doubtless, did Patrick Henry see in this 
slender, sandy-haired lad a political leader and associate, — the pen 
of a Revolution of which himself was to be the tongue. 

On reaching Williamsburg, we may be sure he did not see that 
metropolis with our disparaging eyes. In the old letters and me- 

19 



20 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON". 

moirs we read delusive accounts of its splendors and gayeties, — of 
the " viceregal court," " vying in elegance with that of St. James ; " 
of the grand equipages of "the gentrj' ; " and of all the pomp and 
circumstance of old Virginia, gathered there in the winter. It was 
"the centre of taste, fashion, and refinement," we are told; and the 
entertainments given at " the palace " were a blending of refine- 
ment and sumptuosity " worthy of the representative of royalty." 
Such statements do not prepare the cold investigator to discover that 
the capital of Virginia was an unpaved village of a thousand 
inhabitants, surrounded by an expanse of dark-green tobacco-fields 
as far as the eye could reach. Andrew Burnaby, an English clergy- 
man who visited it eight months before the arrival of our student, 
estimates the number of its houses at " about two hundred," and its 
.population at "one thousand souls, whites and negroes." He men- 
tions, also, that "there are ten or tivelve gentlemen's families con- 
stantly residing in it, besides merchants and tradesmen." But he 
adds that in the winter, when the legislature and the great court of 
the colony were in session, the place was " crowded with the gentry 
of the country," and then there were balls and gayeties ; but, as 
soon as business is over, the gentry return to their plantations, and 
" the town is in a manner deserted." 

_^Williamsburg, insignificant as it may seem to us, furnished the 
pattern for the city of Washington. It consisted chiefly of one 
street, a hundred feet broad and three-quarters of a mile long, with 
the Capitol at one end, the college at the other, and a ten-acre 
square with public buildings in the middle. It was well arranged to 
display whatever of equipage or costume the town could boast. As 
the great planters' families travelled in their own huge coaches, 
which at least had been gorgeous in the fashion of the age, — 
coaches drawn of necessity by six horses, — and as the dress of the 
period was bright with color and jDicturesque in style, we may well 
believe that this broad avenue presented, during the season, a strik- 
ing and animated scene. 

The public buildings, as they apj^eared to Jefferson's maturer 
judgment, were of a mongrel description, generally unpleasing and 
inharmonious. The Capitol, in which he was to witness such thrill- 
ing scenes, and take part in such important events, he thought "a 
light and airy structure," — heavy and dull as it looks in the old 
pictures ; and the governor's palace, though not handsome without, 



HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 21 

was large and commodious, and surrounded by agreeable grounds ; 
but the college and the hospital he condemns utterly. They were 
"rude, misshapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be 
taken for brick-kilns." This, however, was the remark of a con- 
noisseur in architecture. The main edifice of the college resembled 
those brick barracks of Yale and Harvard, built in the same period : 
two stories high, with a steep roof and a row of windows in it, and a 
small belfry on its summit ; quite good enough for young gentlemen 
who kept dogs and guns in their rooms, and considered it the chief 
end of students to frustrate the object for which they were sent to the 
institution. This building, with two solid-looking professors' houses 
near it, all standing in a square of four acres, marked with well- 
worn paths, and not wanting in large trees, presented upon the 
whole a respectable appearance. The arriving student probably did 
not think it so despicable as the author of the " Notes on Virginia." 
The private houses of Williamsburg, according to Mr. Burnaby, 
were "of wood, covered with shingles, and but indifferently built." 
The site of the town, however, was agreeable, — an elevated plateau, 
midway between the York and the James, six miles from both. 
Those breezes which swept across the peninsula, and raised the 
clouds of dust in Williamsburg streets that annoyed the English 
traveller, tempered the burning heat of the summer, and, as he 
records, kept the town free from mosquitoes. 

Such was Williamsburg in 1760, the chief residence of Jefferson 
for the next seven years, the most important period of his life ; 
for it was then that he acquired his knowledge and his opinions. 
Whatever Williamsburg may have been to others, it was to him a 
true university; because, coming into familiar contact there with a 
few universal minds, he was capable of being instructed by them. 
He brought with him to college the three prime requisites of the 
successful student, — perfect health, good habits, and an inquisitive 
intellect. He had come from a pui'e and honest home, where he 
had learned nothing but what was good and honorable ; and he had 
come in good faith, to fulfil his father's fond intention of making 
him a scholar. 

It was an ill-starred institution, this College of William and ]\Iary. 
It had existed sixty-eight years, having been founded in 1692 by 
the sovereigns whose names it bore. They gave it an endowment, 
as an old historian records, of " nineteen hundred and eighty-five 



22 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

pounds fourteen sliillings and ten pence," besides twenty thousand 
acres of land, and certain taxes that yielded three hundred pounds 
a jeav. Other benefactors had bequeathed and given it pro^^erty, 
until it enjoyed an annual income of three thousand pounds ; which 
was enough, with the tuition fees, to maintain an efficient college. 
But, like Harvard and Yale, the institution was hampered by the 
incongruous conditions imposed by the donors of its capital. One 
important estate was given for tiie express purpose of maintaining 
Indians at the college; and Indians were maintained accordingly. 
But Indians cannot receive our civilization. If the college had any 
success with an Indian youth, he was no sooner, tamed than he sick- 
ened and died. The rest may have assumed the white man's liabits 
while they remained at Williamsburg ; but the very day that they 
rejoined their tribe they threw off their college clothes, resumed 
their old costumes and weapons, and ran whooping into the forest, 
irreclaimable savages. And so this fondly-cherished project of the 
benefactors ended in utter failure. But the estate remained ; its in- 
come could only be spent in one way ; and hence the Indian nuisance 
still clung to the college, wasting its resources and lessening its 
attractiveness. 

A leading object of the founders was to provide learned ministers 
of the Established Church ; and consequently there was a professor 
of " divinity," another of moral philosophy ; and the only special 
duty assigned to the president, in return for his two hundred pounds 
a year and his handsome house, was the delivery of four theological 
lectures per annum. As if to give still greater prominence to the 
department of theology, the reverend president usually held the office 
of commissary, or bishop's representative, at a hundred pounds a year, 
and had charge of the parish church of Williamsburg, which swelled 
his income to about six hundred a year, — an official revenue only 
exceeded by that of the governor. Those who know for wlrat kind 
of reasons the fat things in church and state were usually given in 
the good old times will not be surprised to learn that one of the com- 
missary-presidents of the college, in Jefferson's youth, could not pro- 
ceed against the clergy for drunkenness, because he was himself a 
drunkard ; nor will he be at a loss how to explain the indications of 
college riot that lurk in the letters of the time. 

Moreover, the chief object of the founders was not accomplished. 
As the parishes were usually assigned to English clergymen, whom 



HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 23 

the Bishop of London sent to Virginia because there was nothing 
for them in Eiighmd, few young Virginians entered the college with 
a view to compete for a church-living of sixteen thousand pounds of 
tobacco per annum. Yet the costly professorships of divinity had 
to be kept up, and the college was obliged to continue a theological 
seminary without theologians. 

Dead brandies are not only merely inert and useless : the}'' injure 
and disfigure the tree. This college, which ought to have attracted 
the elite of Virginia youth, and sent them home strong and enlight- 
ened to save beautiful Virginia from the blight of tobacco, repelled 
many of them, and seldom regenerated those who came. Young 
men whose fatliers could afford the expense went to English Eton, 
Oxford, and Cambridge, often returning as ignorant as they went 
out, and dissolute beyond \\o^e of reform. Of late years the college 
had been filling up, more and more, with boys who came to learn 
the rudiments of Latin : and it was some time before a clear dis- 
tinction was made between these and the students proper of the 
college. Jeiferson found the institution a medley of college, Indian 
mission, and grammar-school, ill-governed, and distracted by dissen- 
sions among its ruling powers. The Bishop of London, who, as 
chancellor of the institution, had the nomination of its professors, 
sometimes sent out men so manifestly incompetent or unfit, that the 
trustees would not admit them ; and others, being admitted, led scan- 
dalous lives, and filled the college, as the trustees said, with riot, 
contention, and dissipation. Jefierson in old age wrote of "the 
regular annual riots and battles between the students and the town- 
boys, before the Revolution, part of which I was, and the manj'' and 
more serious affraj-s of later times." On Sundays, we are told, when 
the divinity professors and reverend president were away performing 
parochial duties, the more orderly students went off shooting, with 
their dogs behind them, and the others made the village resound 
with their noise. It was not until several years after Jefferson's 
time, that the rights of the several authorities of the college were 
so defined that the siippression of these disorders became possible. 

But out of this chaos Thomas Jefferson contrived to pick a genu- 
ine university education; because, among the crowd of its school- 
masters, mission teachers, divinity professors, and bishop's proteges, 
there was, by some strange chance, one man of knowledge and abil- 
ity, one man who did not " survey the universe from his parish bel- 



24 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

fry," one skilful and sympathetic teacher. " It was my great good 
fortune," he says, in his too brief autobiography, " and what probably 
fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small of Scotland 
was then professor of mathematics. A man profound in most of the 
useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, 
correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged, liberal mindr- 
He, most happily for me, soon became attached to me, and made me 
his daily companion when not engaged in the school; and from his 
conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science, and 
of the system of things in which we are placed. Fortunately the 
philosophical chair became vacant soon after my arrival in college, 
and he was appointed to fill it per interim ; and he was the first 
who ever gave, in that college, regular lectures in ethics, rhetoric, 
and belles-lettres." It is a pleasure to copy a passage like this, — 
one more testimonial to add to the long list of similar ones, from 
Marcus Aurelius to Lord Brougham, which attest the immeasurable 
value of an enlightened teacher of youth. 

I wish we had something more particular of this gentleman. 
Jeiferson's college intimate, John Page, governor of Virginia in 
later years, speaks of him as " my beloved professor," who was 
"afterward the great Dr. Small of Birmingham, the darling friend 
of Darwin." And he confesses that he did not derive all the benefit 
from his instruction that he might; for he was " too sociable to study 
as Mr. Jefferson did, who could tear himself away from his dearest 
friends to fly to his studies." 

Another friend of Jefferson, John Burk, author of a " History of 
Virginia," insinuates that Dr. Small was not too orthodox in his opin- 
ions. The professors, he remarks, weye usually chosen from " the 
licensed champions of orthodoxy ;" by which he appears to mean 
the clergy : bat, " novv and then, in spite of the jealous scrutiny of 
the metropolitan, some unbeliever would steal into the fold." This, 
he adds, was particularly the case with the mathematical department, 
for which divines were generally incompetent ; and he illustrates 
this observation by mentioning "the friend and companion of the 
poetic and philosophic Darwin," Professor Small, who had formed 
the minds of so many of the youth of the Province. It is certain the 
college was beginning to have an ill name among the religious peo- 
ple, not on account of the bad lives and inefficient teacliing of some of 
" the divines " connected with it, but of the heretical opinions supposed 



HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 25 

to prevail among the students. The true reason, it is said, whj^ James 
Madison went to Princeton College, was the dread his parents had 
lest he should imbibe those opinions if he attended the college nearer 
home. Edmund Randolph, who succeeded Mr. Jefferson in the office 
of Secretary of State, was a student of William and Mary about this 
time. He used to say that such heresies were much in vogue at the 
college, and he had a vivid recollection of a scene that followed his 
utterance of something in unison with the prevailing tone. One of 
the leaders of the new opinions patted him on the head, and called 
him a promising youth for daring to express so hold a thought. The 
fact remains, however, that all the professors were required by law 
to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, and all their pupils to say 
the Church-of-En gland Catechism. 



CHAPTER VI. 

AT COLLEGE. 

The student settled to his work. Without neglecting Latin and 
Greek, liis chief employment since his ninth year, he now became, 
under Professor Small's tuition, enamoured of mathematics. That 
science, as he wrote in later years, became "the passion of his life;" 
and he could read off in his 3'outh, " with the facilit}^ of common 
discourse," processes which at seventy cost him " labor and time and 
slow investigation." It is evident, from many trifling indications, 
that he subdued mathematics to his will, and employed it all his 
days as a familiar, obedient servant. Part of his travelling appa- 
ratus, even on short journej's, was a box of instruments and a book 
of logarithms, and he always had a rule in his pocket. Professor 
Small, who left Scotland about the time (1756) that Professor Black 
was appointed to the chair of chemistry which he covered with im- 
mortal lustre, — James Watt and the improved steam-engine being 
among its incidental results, — shared in the new enthusiasm for 
applied science ; and he imparted it to his j^oung companion. There 
was some apparatus, it appears, at William and Mary. Doubtless 
Professor Small possessed the electrical tubes, one of which Benjamin 
Franklin, printer, had rubbed with so much effect fifteen jea.x3 
before. Details of the student's scientific course we do not possess; 
but we know that he derived from his walks and talks with Professor 
Small the habit of surveying objects with the eyes of science, and 
subjecting them to scientific tests, — one of the chief points of differ- 
ence between the educated and the ignorant mind. 

He worked hard in college, and ever harder, as his circle widened, 
— too hard at last, — fifteen hours a day, as he said himself when 
talking of college daj^s. He kept a horse or two at Williamsburg, 
it appears (and riding on ho}'seback should be part of every college 

26 



AT COLLEGE. 27 

course) ; but, as his love of knowledge grew, his rides became shorter 
and less frequent, until the only exercise he allowed himself on a 
regular working-day was a rapid run out of town of a mile while it 
was getting dark enough for candles. The beloved violin was never 
quite laid aside : he snatched a kiss now and then, instead of his 
three hours' wooing. Though related, through his mother, to most 
of the society of the place, and fond of society, he withdrew from it" 
more and more. Few students could have indulged in such excess 
of mental exertion with impunitj^; nor could he for a long period, 
although " blessed," as he once wrote, " with organs of digestion 
which accepted and concocted, without ever murmuring, whatever 
the palate chose to consign to them." His habits, too, were excel- 
lent. The simple, old-fashioned cookery, that gave the human race 
so many ages of good digestion, had not yet become one of the lost 
arts in Virginia ; and, like most of the well-nurtured young Vir- 
ginians of that period, he was so happy as to escape the servitude of 
tobacco. Many planters of the olden time, who had grown rich by 
the culture of tobacco, held the use of it in contempt. One reason 
assigned, in a letter of the period, why the young men of Virginia 
should not be sent to England for education, was, that they were so 
likely to acquire there the horrid practice of smoking. 

The number of persons much interested in intellectual affairs has 
never been great in any community, not even in college-towns. 
In the Williamsbi;rg of that day we hear of but two individuals 
who could be associates of Dr. Small. One was Francis Fauquier, 
the lieutenant-governor of the Province, wlio inhabited " the palace," 
and presided over the the grand entertainments given therein. Jef- 
ferson speaks of him as the ablest governor colonial Virginia ever had. 
Perhaps, in saying so, he meant to damn him with faint praise. He 
appears to have been a gentleman of the school of Louis XIV., 
translated into England by Charles II., and into English by Lord 
Chesterfield. We find him spoken of as the most elegant gentleman 
Virginia had ever seen, a great patron of learning and literature, 
himself an admirable scholar, master of an excellent style, both 
spoken and written. It was he who set the fashion of importing 
French literature, which filled so many Virginia libraries, a few years 
later, with Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot. He it was 
also who introduced high play into the polite society of the Province, 
or at least made high play reputable ; vyhich hastened the collapse of 



28 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

some showy Virginia fortunes, already eaten hollow by London cred- 
itors. Whatever his faults, he was a man of high personal and 
official honor. He was one of the few royal officers in the colonies 
who disdained to increase their revenues by conniving at illicit com- 
merce. Archdeacon Bnrnaby reports, that, at a time when other gov- 
ernors were not so scrupulous, Governor Fauquier refused an offer of 
two hundred pounds for a permit to trade with the enemy. He was 
a gentleman, too, of eminent courtesy, of agreeable conversation, 
interested in knowledge and literature, acquainted with the polite 
world of cities, — a man of the metropolis residing for a while in a 
province. 

Prof Small being the governor's most familiar associate, our stu- 
dent, young as he was, became intimate with him also, and was thus 
brought into communication with the great world. The governor, 
alnong his other accomplishments, was a musical amateur. Once a 
week he had a musical party at the palace, to which the guests 
brought their instruments. Jefferson was regularly present with his 
violin ; and at these parties, for the first time in his life perhaps, 
he heard music performed in concert. 

But it was the governor's conversation that did most to form his 
mind. It was during these j^ears that Great Britain, by the con- 
quest of India, Canada, and many islands of the sea, became impe- 
rial ; and when the news of victory came, Fauquier could tell the 
student something of the mighty Chatham, who found his country an 
island, and left it an empire. In Jeff"erson's first year at college, 
'■'The Williamsburg Gazette," Virginia's only newspaper, published 
the account of the accession to the throne of George III., who found 
his country an empire, and left it an island. Of that young prince, 
welcomed to the throne by acclamations in every quarter of the 
globe, the governor could doubtless relate hopeful things, much to 
the content of his young Whig friend from Albemarle. The Jeffer- 
sons, as a Whig famil}^, could not but hail with joy the accession of 
the first king of the Hanover line who was. a native of England. 
They were loyal subjects ever, and none of them more so than this 
youth, the present head of the family. From Governor Fauquier, 
too, he heard, doubtless, something of the literary gossip of London, 
fresh traditions of Addison, Swift, Thomson, Poj^e, and Boling- 
broke. All this was education to the young student. He was get- 
ting knowledge of the world in a very agreeable way. Sitting, as 



AT COLLEGE. 29 

he says, at " the familiar table " of the governor, with Professor 
Small opposite him, he was learning to estimate things by other 
than Virginian standards, and saw more of the universe than could 
be discerned from the parish belfry. Most happily, too, he was one 
of those, who, as they go their way through life, get the good 
that chance companions have to offer them, without imbibing the 
evil that qualifies it. He caught the graces and escaped the vices of 
the Chesterfield period. In avoiding the governor's habit of gam- 
bling, he went even to an extreme ; for, it is said, he never had a 
card in his house. 

But the daily familiar party at the governor's table consisted of 
four persons. The fourth remains to be mentioned. It was George 
Wythe, a rising member of the bar of Virginia, who was destined to 
a distinguished and long career as lawyer, statesman, professor, and 
judge. He is the more interesting to us as the benevolent and wise 
precejitor by whom three persons of eminent note in the politics of 
the country were introduced to the law, and, through the law, to 
public life, — Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay. 

Virginia, during the hundred and twenty years of seeming pros- 
perity given it by tobacco grown in virgin soil, cultivated by low- 
priced slaves, was an illustration of Mr. Buckle's remark concerning 
the connection between leisure and knowledge. "Without leisure," 
he observes, "science is impossible ;' and, when leisure has been won, 
most of the class possessing it will waste it in the pursuit of pleas- 
ure, but a few will employ it in the pursuit of knowledge." How 
perfectly this describes the Virginia of 1760! The great majority 
of the ruling class lived lives of thoughtless profusion and self- 
indulgence, with Governor Fauquier as the accomplished master of 
the revels. John Burk, historian of Virginia, very friendly to the 
memory of that brilliant personage, tells us that Fauquier found 
the Virginian gentlemen quite, to his mind, — as profuse and fond 
of pleasure as himself; and, after spending a winter of elegant 
dissipation at the capital, he would enter upon a round of visits to 
the great proprietors ; among whom, adds Burk, "' the rage for play- 
ing deep, reckless of time, health, or money, spread like a conta- 
gion." 

In the midst of such scenes grew up a few men — a very few, but 
always a few — who sought knowledge with disinterested love, and 
with such success as almost to redeem the character of their Pro- 



30 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSOlSr. 

vince and period. Three of the best educated gentlemen America 
has produced were young men during Fauquier's term of service, — 
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Wythe, — all of 
them men of singular moral purity and elevation of tone, and all 
eminently capable of public spirit. It seems as if the very preva- 
lence of the self-indulgent vices made these golden hearts recoil 
from them with the greater decision and firmness. Jefferson wrote 
once from the White House in Washington to a grandson at school: 
" When I recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I 
associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with 
some of them, and become as worthless to society as they were." 
" But," he adds, " I had the good fortune to become acquainted 
very early with some characters of very high standing, and to feel 
the incessant wish that I could ever become what they were. 
Under temptations and difficulties, I would ask myself. What w'ould 
Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph, do in this situation? 
What course in it will insure me their approbation ? I am certain 
that this mode of deciding on my conduct tended more to correct- 
ness than any reasoning powers I possessed. Knowing the even 
and dignified line they j)ursued, I never could doubt for a moment 
which of two courses would be in character for them. Whereas, 
seeking the same object through a process of much reasoning, and 
with the jaundiced eye of youth, I should often have erred." He 
tells his grandson that he was of necessity brought into contact with 
the extremes of character, — jockeys and moralists, racing men and 
philosophers, gamblers and statesmen ; and often, " in the enthu- 
siastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse," 
and during a contest of mind in court or legislature, he has asked 
himself which of these trium[)hs he should prefer. 

George Wythe was thirtj'-three years of age at the beginning of 
Jefferson's college life. Though heir of a competent estate, he was 
wholly self-educated, except that, his mother, as tradition reports, 
assisted him by keeping an eye upon an English Testament while 
he translated from the Greek. He became, as contemporaries agree, 
the best Greek scholar Virginia had ever seen ; to which Mr. Jef- 
ferson adds, the best Latin scholar also. Young Henry Clay, his 
amanuensis long after, not knowing a Greek letter, had trouble 
enough in copying his decisions, interspersed as they were with 
passages from Greek authors. The chancellor was an old man 



AT COLLEGE. 31 

« 
then, and this habit of quoting Greek was an old man's foible; but 
when Jefferson was a student at Williamsburg, he knew him as an 
able, vigilant lawyer, an enthusiast for all classical knowledge, and 
fond to an extreme of Greek literature and Grecian history. Jeffer- 
son's preference would naturally have been for Greek if he had 
never seen George Wythe ; but doubtless their similarity of taste 
was a bond of union between them, and nerved him for the supreme 
achievement of old-fashioned scholarship, — a conquest of the Greek 
language. Wythe was a man of nice conscience. He was among 
the first to perceive the incongruous iniquity of slavery in our mod- 
ern world, and he early washed his hands of it by emancipating his 
slaves. Henry Clay went straight from his office and inspiration to 
Kentuck}^, where his first political act was an attempt to induce 
that 3'^oung Commonwealth to start fair by abolishing slavery. 

Such was the party oftenest gathered about the governor's "fami- 
liar table : " Professor Small, the mathematician and man of science ; 
George Wythe, the moralist, learned in law and Greek; Francis 
Fauquier, the man of the world of the period; Thomas Jefferson, a 
shy, inquisitive young man, quick to take in all which these accom- 
plished men had to give, and contributing his share of the enter- 
tainment by the intelligent sympathy with which he listened. 
These men were his teachers ; this table was his university. 

Four persons so formed to entertain and improve one another 
need never expect to remain long together. The party was broken 
in 1762 by Professor Small's removal to Birmingham, where he had 
a bright career. The young man whom he aided to form corre- 
sponded with him till the Revolutionary War. They did not agree, 
it seems, on the topics of the Revolutionary period ; but Jefferson 
not the less revered him as the person who met him at the thresh- 
old of life, and directed his steps aright, — who kept him out of the 
slough of mean Provincial pleasures and excesses by awakening his 
intelligence, and guiding him to the sources whence its proper 
nourishment is drawn. An awakened mind, a hearty interest in 
intellectual things, is virtue's strongest ally; and Jefferson felt that 
he owed this unspeakable boon to Professor Small. 

A profession was necessary to the student. His father's tobacco- 
farm on the James was the portion of his brother Randolph, still a ■ 
child. The Shadwell estate was charged with the support of his 
mother and six sisters ; and Virginia estates were not apt to be very 



32 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

productive when the eye of the master was wanting. He can 
scarcely be said to have had a choice of vocations. He was the last 
person in the workl to think of tlie army or navy as a career ; and, 
if he had, it would not have been possible, perhaps, for him to get a 
commission. It was not as a " midshipman " that Washington's 
mother thought of sending her son to sea, but as a sailor before the 
mast: sucli was the narrow choice a parent had then in Virginia for 
younger sons. The very letter which discloses this unexpected 
piece of information shows how few employments were exercised in 
the Province. Mrs. Washington mentioned the scheme of sending 
George to sea, to her brother, Joseph Ball, in London. That gen- 
tleman replied, that she had better put him an apprentice to a 
tinker; " for," said he, " a common sailor before the mast has by no 
means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him 
from a ship wliere he has fifty shillings a month, and make him 
take twenty-three, and cut and slash him, and use him like a negro, 
or rather like a dog." And even (he proceeds to say) if the lad 
should work his way to the top of the ladder, and become the mas- 
ter of a Virginia ship, a "very difficult thing to do," a planter that 
has three or four hundred acres of land and three or four slaves, if he 
be ii dustrious, may live more comfortably, and leave his family in 
better bread, than such a captain can,* And so the mother thought 
bette- of her project, and George Washington did not attempt the 
difficult acliievement of rising to be master of a tobacco-ship. 

There were no manufactures in the Province, except the very 
rudest and crudest. People sent to London for every thing that 
slaves could not make, even window-sashes and the commoner 
implements. The commerce was in British hands. There was, of 
course, no art, no literature, no journalism, and nothing that could 
tempt* intelligence or ambition in the medical profession. If 
Thomas Jefferson had been reared in a European capital, the first 
wish of his heart would have been to be an artist of some kind. 
After toying with music for a while, he would perhaps have fixed 
upon architecture as his profession. In Virginia, at Williamsburg, 
with George Wythe for a daily associate, he must needs become a 
lawyer ; and accordingly, in 1763, after two years' residence at the 
college, he began, under Mr. Wythe's direction, the study of the 
law. 

* Meade's Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, vol. ii. p. 128. 



AT COLLEGE. 33 

Perhaps the example of his jovial young acquaintance, Patrick 
Henry, first turned his thoughts to the legal profession. In 1760, 
a few days after his arrival in Williamsburg, who should present 
himself at his room in the college but the merry Patrick ! But he 
had come on a serious errand. He was bent on a change in his 
mode of life, that had important consequences for his country as 
well as himself. He told the student, that since they had parted, 
after the Christmas holidays, two or three months before, he had 
studied law ! He had studied it, in fact, six weeks ; and he had now 
come to Williamsburg to get a license to practise. And he got it ! 
Of the four examiners, only one, George Wythe, persisted in refus- 
ing his signature ; and the three names sufficing, he went off 
triumphant, to tend his father-in-law's tavern for four years longer, 
until his opportunity came. Our student made no such haste. It 
was not in his nature to slight his work, and he prepared himself 
for a four years' course of reading. 

8 



CHAPTER VII. 



jeffersojst in love. 



His college days were over when he had been two years a student 
at William and Mary ; and he went home in December, 1762, with 
Coke upon Lyttleton in his trunk, to spend the winter in reading law. 
He made the journey in his usual leisurely way, visiting friends near 
the road, and found himself, about Christmas time, at a friend's house 
half a day's ride from his own Shadwell. There he staid for two 
or three days, taking part in the festivities of the season, to which 
he could always contribute his violin. On this occasion he had 
brought with him a roll of new minuets for the young ladies ; and 
doubtless he did his part toward the entertainment of the company. 

But he had left his lieart behind him at Williamsburg. He had 
danced too many minuets in the Apollo — the great room of the old 
Raleigh tavern — with Miss Rebecca Burwell, one of the orphan 
daughters of a great house near the capital ; and she had given him 
a watch-paper, cut and painted with her own lovely hands ; and he 
found his mind dwelling night and day upon her sweet image. He 
had packed his Coke at Williamsburg, with the most virtuous reso- 
lutions of reading him, even amid the gayeties of the holiday time; 
but the work lay in his trunk untouched. He even wrote to his 
college friend, John Page, that he wished the Devil had old Coke, 
for he was sure he never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in his 
life. " What ! " lie says, " are there so few inquietudes tacked to this 
momentary life of ours, that we must needs be loading ourselves 
with a thousand more ? " How different this from the tone of fond 
regard witli which he speaks, in the grave letters of his maturer 
years, of Coke and his works. But he was in love ; and he was writ- 
ing on a Christmas Day, a hundred miles from the object of his 
affection. 
34 



JEFFERSON IN LOVE. 35 

He liad risen on that joyful morning to face what mtist have been, 
to a young fellow in love for the first time, a dreadful catastrophe. 
He told his friend Page that he was in a house surrounded by ene- 
mies, who took counsel together against his soul ; who, when he lay 
down to rest, said, Come, let us destroy him ! In the night the 
" cursed rats," at the instigation of the Devil, if there was a Devil, 
had eaten his pocket-book within a foot of his head, carried off his 
"jemmy-worked silk garters," and all those new minuets. But 
these were trifles. It had rained in the night; and in the morning 
he found his watch all afloat in a pool of water, and as silent as the 
rats that had eaten his pocket-book. But this was not the catastro- 
phe. '*The subtle particles of the water with which the case was 
filled, had, by their penetration, so overcome the cohesion of the 
particles of the paper of which my dear picture and w.atch-papet 
were composed, that, in attempting to take them out to dry them — 
good God ! Mens hot-ret referre ! — my fingers gave them such a 
rent, as I fear /never shall get over." He is so overcome by the 
recollection, that he cannot keep up the jocular strain, but breaks 
into a serious invocation. Whatever misfortunes may attend the 
j)icture or the lover, his hearty prayers shall be, that all the health 
and happiness which Heaven can send may be the portion of the 
original, and that so much goodness may ever meet with what is 
most agreeable in this world, as he is sure it must in the next. "And 
now," he adds, " although the picture may be defaced, there is so 
lively an image of her imprinted in my mind, that I shall think of 
her too often, I fear, for my peace of mind, and too often, I am sure, 
to get through old Coke this winter." 

Message upon message he sends to the young ladies at Williams- 
burg, with whom, he says, the better part of him, his soul, ever is, 
though that heavy, earthly part, his body, may be absent. With 
one he has a bet pending of a pair of silk garters ; which the rats 
knew he was destined to win, else they never could have been so 
cruel as to carry off the pair he had. And oh, tvould Miss Burwell 
give him another watch-paper of lier own cutting ? What does dear 
Page think ? Would he ask her ? A watch-paper cut by her fin- 
gers, though it were only " a plain round one," he should esteem 
much more than the nicest one in the world cut by other hands. 
Another young lady, he had heard, was offended with him. What 
could it be for ? Neither in word nor deed had he ever, in all his 



36 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOlsr. 

life, been guilty of the least disrespect to her; and, no matter what 
she might say or do, he was determined ever to look upon her as 
" the same honest-hearted, good-humored, agreeable lady " he had 
alwaj's thought her. So full was he of Williamsburg and its lovely 
girls, — " Sukey Potter," " Betsy Moore," ''Judy Burwell," '' Nancy," 
and, above all, " Becca Burwell," otherwise " Belinda," the adored 
one, — that, on this Christmas Day, 1762, he wrote a letter about them 
that would have filled a dozen of our trivial modern sheets of paper. 
It well became him to write such an epistle on his nineteenth Christ- 
mas. Young men of nineteen still write such who have -preserved 
their innocence. 

He was at home soon after Christmas. Absence only made his 
heart grow fonder. He missed the gayety and variety, the friends 
and stir of- life and business at the capital. He found the old farm- 
house dull. There must have been something uncongenial there, 
else so affectionate a youth, the head of the family, would not have 
spent his Christmases away from home. Perhaps his mother w-as 
oppressed by the care of a family of eight children and thirty slaves ; 
or she ma}' have agreed with tliat small portion of the clergy who 
regarded the fiddle and the minuet as a "profanation " of Christmas. 
However that may be, this sudden change from the Apollo and the 
palace, from college friends and employments, to a farm-house on 
the frontier and Coke's digest of law, was almost too much for his 
philosophy. He could hardly muster spirits to write to his friend 
Page. When he had been at home three weeks, he wrote a short 
letter, which shows him reduced to a sorry plight indeed. He was 
torn with the contest raging in his soul between his passion and his 
judgment ; and he plunges into a letter, as it were head-foremost, 
seeking relief in converse with his friend, with whom he had been 
accustomed to exchange such confidences : " Dear Page, to tell you 
the plain truth, I have not a syllable to write to you about ; " which 
was a lover's way of stating that his heart was full to bursting. "I 
do not conceive," he continues, " that any thing can happen in my 
world which j^ou would give a curse to know." The tvorlds of these 
two friends were, indeed unlike; for John Page, heir to one of the 
largest estates, lived in the largest mansion of all Virginia, — Roswell, 
— which stands to this day near the banks of the York Eiver, a 
vast square barrack, treeless, fenceless, dismantled, a pile without 
inhabitant, a picture of desolation. "All things here," the dis- 



JEFFERSON IN LOVE. . 37 

tractecl lover went on, " appear to me to trudge on in one and the 
same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, din- 
ner, and supper, and go to bed again that we may get up the next 
morning and do the same ; so that you never saw two peas more 
alike than our yesterday and to-day." 

If he had nothing to tell, he had plenty to ask. A jury of lovers 
would have pronounced his situation serious in the extreme. He 
was enamoured of a beauty and an heiress: she in the full lustre 
of her charms ; he a youth not twenty, of small estate heavily burr 
dened, reading the elementary book of a profession requiring years 
of preparation. Moreover, he had the usual dream of foreign travel. 
Before settling to the business of life, he meant to visit England, 
Holland, France, Spain, Italy, — where he would buy " a good fiddle," 
— and then cross to Egypt, returning home by the way of the St.' 
Lawrence and Canada. Such a tour would require two or three 
years. Would she wait ? Could he ask her to wait ? Slie must 
love him very much to do that, and he did not know that she loved 
him at all; for the watch-paper meant nothing particular, — indicat- 
ing friendly feeling, nothing more. What would dear Page advise ? 
Should he go at once to town, receive his sentence, and end this 
awful suspense ? Inclination prompted this course ; but, if she 
rejected him, he would be " ten times more wretched than ever." 
In this dilemma, he had some thoughts of going to Petersburg, "if 
the actors go there in May," and keeping on to Williamsburg for the 
birth-night ball at the Apollo, which of course she would attend. 
But, after all, had not he and Page better go abroad at once for a 
two or three years' tour ? " If we should not both be cured of love 
in that time, I think the devil would be in it." 

He remained at home, however, all that winter and all the ensu- 
ing summer, wrestling with love and Coke, writing long letters to 
Page on the one, and long notes on the other in his blank-books. 
Page, though he was as far gone in love as Jefferson, tried to act 
as his friend's attorney in love ; and Jefferson, on his part, reflected 
much on Page's " case," and favored him with sage advice. And 
so the affair went on nearly all that year. 

" The test of a woman is goM," says poor Eichard, "and the test 
of a man is woman." This young man bore the test well. He 
was not carried away, even by this first yearning passion, but held 
firmly to his purposes, making his love subordinate to them. 



38 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

After viewing the subject in every light, he could only come to this 
wise conclusion : If she said Yes, he should be happy; but, "if she 
does not, I must endeavor to be as much so as possible." He then 
bestows upon his fellow-sufferer a discourse upon the necessity of 
fortifying the mind against inevitable strokes of ill-fortune. "The 
only method of doing this," he remarks, " is to assume a perfect 
resignation to the Divine Will ; to consider that whatever does 
happen must happen, and that by our uneasiness we cannot pre- 
vent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after 
it has fallen." This attitude of mind, which he recommends to his 
friend in several rotund and solemn sentences, will enable a man to 
tread the thorny path of life with " a pious and unshaken resigna- 
tion." He ends this discourse with a sentence which reminds us 
that Dr. Johnson was then a power in the world : " Few things will 
disturb him at all ; nothing will disturb him much." 

The lover had occasion for all his philosophy. In October, when 
the General Court convened, he must needs be in Williamsburg, to 
watch its proceedings, and submit knotty questions to his friend 
Wythe. He flew thither on the wings of love. There was a ball 
at the Apollo. He met her there. Who so happy as he when Tie 
led her out to the dance? He had made up his mind to speak, if 
opportunity favored; and he had meditated some moving passages, 
which he hoped would touch her heart, and call forth the response 
he desired. But, alas! when at length, after so many months of 
longing, the moment arrived, and he had her tete-a-tete, he could 
only stammer a few broken sentences, with dreadful pauses between 
them ; which elicited no explicit reply, and had no result except to 
plunge him into the depths of shame and despair. " For God's 
sake, COME," he writes to Page, who had not yet arrived. He met 
her again. The fearful subject was again approached. This time 
he got on a little better; explained his projects; did not put the 
question, but gave her to understand that he should do so in due 
time. Girls of spirit are not won in that manner, and we may pre- 
sume she did not flatter his hopes ; for when next he wrote to his 
friend, he calls the capital of Virginia, the scene of his disaster, by 
the name of " Devilsburg." The probability is, that the young 
lady was engaged at the time, since, a few months after the 
tete-a-tete in the Apollo, she was married to that dread being — 
another! Page, too, seems to have been crossed in love* but he 



JEFFEKSON IN LOVE. 39 

immediately consoled himself by courting — another. Poor love-sick 
Jefferson declared he would not believe the tale till he had heard it 
from Page himself. For his own part, he had been perfectly sure, 
during the whole course of his love, that, if Belinda rejected him, 
his heart was dead to love forever ; and he wanted to know his fate 
as soon as possible, that, if doomed to disappointment, he might 
have " more of life to wear it off." 

How captivating to lovers is the poetry of love ! It was during 
these two or three years of longing that London ships were bringing 
to Virginia, among the other new publications, volumes of the 
poems of Ossian, invested with the halo of a London celebrity, soon 
to become European. Burly Johnson, tyrant of Great Britain, had 
not yet denounced them as forgeries ; and all the reading world 
accepted them as genuine relics of antiquity. In these poems there 
is much which could not but have impressed a youth who had 
listened spell-bound to the melodious oratory of an Indian chief, 
of which he understood not a word, and gazed with such interest 
upon the scene of the various groups of listeners, each group by its 
own fire, and the full-orbed moon shining over all. It was an 
Ossian scene. But he was now a lovelorn young man; and Ossian 
contains on almost every page some picture of beauty in distress, 
some utterance of passion or tenderness, which lovers can easily 
make their own. *" Daura, my daughter, thou wert fair, — fair as the 
moon on Para, white as the driven snow, sweet as the breathing 
gale." So was Belinda. " Her fair bosom is seen from her robe, 
as the moon from the clouds of night, when its edge heaves white 
on the view from the darkness which covers its orb." He had often 
observed this fine effect when dancing at the Apollo with Belinda, 
arrayed in the bodice of the period. "Fair was she, the daughter 
of the mighty Conlock. She appeared like a sunbeam among 
women." Precisely the observation he had frequently made to Page, 
when glorious Belinda appeared, surrounded by her excellent but 
commonplace friends. " Often met their eyes of love." E-apturous 
thought ! Would it ever be any thing more than a thought ? 
Tradition has not recorded the color of Belinda's hair ; but whether 
it were of the hue of the "raven's wing," or "dark brown,"^ or 
of some lighter shade ; whether she wore her hair " flowing," or 
"wandering," or in some other touching style, he had not far to 
go in Ossian without meeting a damsel similarly adorned, with the 
additional resemblance of white hauds and snowy arms. 



40 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

"^ It belongs to youtli to abandon itself to these literary raptures ; 
but there has seldom been a case of such lasting fascination as this. 
He could not get over it. His passion for Ossiau long outlived his 
love for Belinda. The fulminations of Dr. Johnson, if they were 
heard on this side of the Atlantic, could not shake his faith. It 
chanced that Charles MacPherson, a relative of the translator, 
visited Virginia a few years after, when Jefferson made his ac- 
quaintance, and, we may be sure, gave utterance to his enthusiasm. 
The longer he read the ancient poet, the more interested he became ; 
and for ten years of his life, at least, he thought "this rude bard 
of the North the greatest poet that ever existed." His friends had 
but to start that topic to call from him the most animated discourse, 
interspersed with many a favorite passage, delivered with his best 
elocution. 

Ossian had other American admirers. Some enthusiast, perhaps, 
it was who took the name of Selma from Ossian, and gave it to 
a town in Alabama, since become important, as another reader of 
poetry fancied the pretty name of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," 
and called a village in New York, Auburn. With regard to other 
familiar authors, the student's preferences were such as we should 
expect, — Shakspeare, Homer, Moliere, Cervantes, and the old Eng- 
lish songs and ballads. Copies of songs in his youthful hand are 
still preserved, — simple old love-ditties that pleased the simple old 
generations. Fiction had not then become one of the fine arts, and 
he had little relish for any but the few immortal tales. Don 
Quixote, his descendants think, was the only fiction lie ever read 
twice. 



CHAPTER VIII. • 

COMING OF AGE. 

FoETUJfATELT for love-sick swains, the affairs of tliis vulgar 
■world go on, little as they may regard them; and, indeed, there is 
reason to surmise that our lover recovered his serenity very soon 
after he knew his fate. In his long letters to Page on their affairs 
of the heart, there is generally a saving clause like this, " The court 
is at hand, wliich I must attend constantly ; " or this, "As I suppose 
you do not use your ' Statutes of Britain,' if you can lend them to 
me till I can provide myself with a copy, it will infinitely oblige 
me." During the period of his preparation for the bar, he usually 
spent the winter at the capital and the summer at home ; working 
at both places, as he did everywhere and always, with a constancy, 
system, and cheerfulness, of which there have been few examples 
among the toiling sons of men. It was this that soon enabled him 
to play groomsman for happier friends with so much gayety, and 
contemplate John Page's fortunate suit without a sigh. If we pos- 
sessed nothing of this part of his life but these familiar letters to 
John Page, wherein love and the Apollo are every thing to him, and 
Coke appears as an '' old dull scoundrel," lying snugly packed in a 
trunlc, we should be utterly deceived. 

Letters, indeed, though of eminent value as biographical material, 
are most misleading, unless we employ other means of information. 
In this respect they are like newspapers, which are a kind of digest 
of the letters of the time, and valuable as showing, not what 
occurred at a given period, but what was then thought to have 
occurred. The very exhaustion which results from long mental toil 
may cause a student to write in a strain of reckless audacity or rol- 
licking merriment very unlike his habitual tone, — as people who 
find themselves in extremely dismal circumstances sometimes aban- 

41 



42 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

don tliemselves to hilarity. As to the letters of public or famous 
persons, are they not generally written under the expectation or 
dread of ultimate publication? Happily we have other means than 
these few epistles about Belinda and the girls, of knowing how this 
student of law passed his time, both at the capital and at home. 

He came of age in April, 1764. According to an old British 
custom, he signalized the year by causing an avenue of trees to be 
planted near his house. Time has dealt harshly with it ; for, after a 
hundred and ten years, there are only a few battered, decaying 
trees left, locusts and sycamores. He did not spend tliis birth- 
day at home, but at Williamsburg, where he and all the other 
mathematical heads of the place were intent upon a grand opera- 
tion of measurement. "Every thing," he writes to Page, "is now 
ready for taking the height of this place above the water of the 
creeks," — two streams, one a tributary of tho James, and the other 
of the York, both navigable to within a mile of Williamsburg; 
and he hopes Page will come to take part in the interesting affair, 
" if his mistress can spare him." 

He did not delay in accepting the responsibilities of his position 
as a leading gentleman of his county. We find him soon in two of 
his father's offices, — justice of the peace and vestryman of the 
parish. Not long after coming of age he set on foot a public im- 
provement of importance to his neighborhood. The river Rivanna, 
that flowed by his land, although a considerable stream, was so 
obstructed as to be useless for purposes of navigation. Scarcely an 
empty canoe had ever floated on it to the James. Upon reaching 
home he examined its channel ; and, perceiving that it could be 
cleared for twenty-two miles without too great expense, he set on 
foot a subscription for the purpose, which was successful ; and, after 
procuring an act of the legislature authorizing the work, he caused 
it to be done. The result was, that he and his neighbors used the 
river thenceforth for carrj'ing down all the produce of their farms. 
Thus did this colonial squire announce and celebrate his coming of 
age. 

The young man took hold of his business as a farmer in a man- 
ner which showed that the genuine culture of the mind is the best 
preparation for the common as well as for the higher duties of life. 
In every thing he did he was the educated being. Was there ever a 
mortal so exact, so punctual, so indefatigable as he, in recording and 



COMING OF AGE. 43 

tabularlzing details ? He may he said to have lived pen in hand. 
He kept a garden-book, a farm-book, a weather-book, a receipt-book, 
a pocket-expenditure book, and, later, a fee-book ; and there was 
nothing too trivial to be entered in one of them, provided it really 
had any relation to matters of importance. In the small, neat 
hand then common in Virginia, h$ would record in his pocket-book 
such items as these : " Put into the church-box, Id. • " " Paid a barber, 
lid. ; " " Paid for pins, 4/2 ; " " Paid for whetting penknife, Ad. ; " 
" Paid my part for an express to AVilliamsburg, 10s. ; " " Paid -Bell 
for books, 355. / " "Paid postage, 8/3." In his garden-book, for some 
pages of which we are indebted to Mr. Handall, may be read count- 
less entries like the following : " March 30, sowed a patch of later 
peas ; " " July 15, planted out celery ; " " July 22, had the last 
dish of our spring peas ; " " March 31, grafted five French chestnuts 
into two stocks of common chestnut." His garden-books show 
that he was a bold and constant experimenter, always eager to try 
foreign seeds and roots, of which he introduced a great number in 
the course of his life. They show, also, that he was a close 
observer and calculator. His weather-book, of which I possess a 
few pages, given to me by Mr. Kandall, is a wonder of neatness and 
minuteness, — fifty-nine days' weather history on one small page. 
This is one day's record: "March 24, at 6.30, A.31., ther., 27°; 
barom. 25°, wind N. W. (force of wind not stated) ; weather, clear 
after rain, Blue Ridge and higher parts of S. W., mountain covered 
with snow. No snow here, but much ice ; black frost." Multiply 
this by fifty-nine, and you have the contents of one page of his 
weather-book, every word of which, after the lapse of a century, is 
as clear and legible as diamond type. Ifc is ruled in ten columns, 
one for each class of entries. This practice of minute record, which 
remained with him to the end of his days, he began while he was still 
a student. Nor did he ever content himself with the mere records 
of items. These were regularly reviewed, added, compared, and 
utilized in every possible way. It was the most remarkable of all 
his habits. 

Interesting events were occurring in the family at the Shadwell 
farm-house. During his first year in college one of his sisters was 
married ; and now, soon after his coming of age, another marriage in 
the family, and one that proved of far more importance to the head 
of the house, became probable. 



44 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Among the most beloved of liis schoolfellows was Dabney Carr, a 
youth destined like himself to the bar. It was that Dabney Carr 
who fills the place in the annals and the hearts of Virginia which 
young Josiah Quincy occupies in those of Massachusetts ; both 
having died in the prime of early manhood, at the beginning of the 
Revolution, after figuring honorably in its opening scenes. At this 
time, when Jefferson was coming into his duties as head of his 
family, clearing out his river, and watching his early peas, Dabney 
Carr was getting into practice as a country lawyer ; and when Jef- 
ferson was at home, during the long summers, the two friends and 
fellow-students were insej)arable. Two miles from Jefferson's home 
was an isolated mountain, five hundred and eighty feet high, which 
he afterwards named Monticello, or The Little Mount, covered then 
to the summit with the primeval forest. High up on this mountain, 
in the deepest shade of the luxuriant woods, under an ancient oak 
of vast size, the young friends constructed a rustic seat; and thither, 
in the summer mornings, they would ride with their law-books, and 
pass peaceful days there in study and conversation. Both of them 
became strongly attached to the spot. They made a compact, that 
^whichever of them died first should be buried by the other under 
'that grand old tree. The compact was fulfilled; and the place was, 
■ long after, enclosed and made the burial-place of the Jefifersons ; so 
that both the friends now repose on the spot where they studied 
together in their youth. It was these happy visits to the mountain 
that led to its selection, by and by, as the site of Jefferson's abode. 
When the young men returned to Shadwell at the close of the day, 
they returned to a house full of sisters, three of whom were young 
ladies, twenty-five, twenty-one, nineteen years of age; the work of 
the day done, the costume of the evening assumed, the evening meal 
ready, the violin and music in the next room. It was the beautiful 
and gifted Martha, in ber ninteenth year, upOn whom Dabney Carr 
fixed his affections ; and in the summer vacation of 1765 Jefferson 
had tlie pleasure of seeing them married. The bridegroom had still 
his fortune to make ; and they went away to live, a few miles off, in 
the next county of Louisa, in a house amusing to them all for its 
smallness and simplicity. It was one of the triumphant marriages. 
" Tliis friend of ours. Page," wrote Jefferson, when they had been 
five years married, *'in a very small house, with a table, half a dozen 
chairs, and one or two servants, is the happiest man in the universe. 



COMING OF AGE. 45 

Every incident in life he so takes as to render it a source of pleas- 
ure. Witli as much benevolence as the heart of man will hold, but 
with an utter neglect of the costly apparatus of life, he exhibits to 
the world a new phenomenon in philosophy, — the Samian sage in 
the tub of the cynic." To this pleasing picture, Mr. Wirt adds, 
from tradition current in Virginia, that Dabney Carr was the most 
formidable rival in oratory that Patrick Henry had among the law- 
yers of his own age ; and that his person was of engaging elegance, 
and his voice finely toned. In old age Mr. Jefferson wrote of him as 
the man who united inflexible firmness of principle to the most per- 
fect amiability. 

But on this happy wedding-day in July the shadow of death 
already rested upon the young student's home. His eldest sister, 
Jane, the best of all his friends hitherto, was approaching her end. 
She died in October, leaving a void in the home and the heart of her 
brother that was never quite filled. From the funeral of this beloved 
sister he was summoned soon, by the opening of the General Court, 
to resume his law-studies at Williamsburg. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 



Not that he discontinued those studies at home. He used, in 
after years, to tell his grandchildren, that, when he was a law-student, 
he kept a clock in his bedroom at Shadwell, on a shelf opposite his 
bed ; and his rule was to get up in the summer mornings as soon 
as he could see what o'clock it was, and begin his day's work at once. 
In the winter he rose at five, and went to bed at nine. He did a 
fair day's work at his law-books every day, even at home, besides 
attending to company, besides his vigorous gallop on horseback, 
besides walking to the top of Monticello, besides looking closely to his 
garden and farm, besides caressing his violin, besides keeping up his 
Latin, Greek, French, and an extensive system of other reading. 
Nevertlieless, it is reasonable to conclude that at the capital he gave 
himself to study more completely than at home ; and it is there that 
we can best observe him as a student. 

The law is not an easy nut to crack, even in these days, after so much 
of its husk has been cut away by the Broughams and the Dudley 
Fields of the legal profession. It will never be easy to apply the 
eternal principles of right to the "cases" that arise in our compli- 
cated human life. But, when Jefferson studied law, generations of 
ingenious men had spent their lives in investing the science of jus- 
tice with difficulties, artificial and needless. They had wrought with 
such success, that if our young justice of the peace had been required 
to record that John Jones had hanged himself at Williamsburg, he 
would have been obliged to say, — and I now copy from a Virginia 
justice's own book, in which his name appears as a subscriber, — that 
" John Jones, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being 
moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, at Williamsburg, 
in a certain wood as aforesaid, standing and being, the said John 
46 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 4T 

Jones, being then and there alone, with a certain hempen cord, of the 
vahie of tliree pence, wliich he then and there had and. hekl in his 
hands, and one end thereof tlien and there put about his rieck, and 
the other end thereof tied about a bough of a certain oak-tree, him- 
self then and there, with the cord aforesaid, voluntarily and feloni- 
ously, and of his malice aforethought, hanged and suffocated." 
This is a specimen of the law jargon of that day, for the retention 
of which lawyers strove so long. It was the confused, bewildering 
element in which lawyers worked for centuries. 

When the love-sick student opened that "old dull scoundrel, Coke," 
he opened a work printed in black-letter, and offering as little prom- 
ise of entertainment or instruction as the outside of a gold-mine does 
of the wealth within it. The author himself, in his Preface, does 
not flatter his readers with any hope of pleasure in the perusal. 

''I shall desire," he says, ''that the learned reader will not con- 
ceive any opinion against any part of this painful and large volume 
until he shall have advisedly read over the whole, and diligently 
searched out and well considered of the several authorities, proofs, 
and reasons, which we have cited and set down for warrant and con- 
formation of our opinions throughout this whole work." 

To add to a student's perplexity, the passages from Lyttleton, the 
ancient lawyer whom Coke is "upon," are written in the law-French 
of Edward III.'s time, plentiful]}'- interspersed with Latin equiva- 
lents and illustrations. But, fortunately, these passages are short, 
being mere texts for old Coke's long discourses. In the edition of 
1789 Lyttleton's observations on " Fee Simple " occupy a third of 
a page ; but Coke's quaint and subtle treatment of the topic fills 
thirty-three pages, with a thick-set hedge of references down each 
page. It would be an excellent month's work for a student to master 
that one chapter. Tedious and repulsive as all this must have been 
to a youth the morning after dancing with Belinda at the Apollo, 
Jefferson learned in due time to value old Coke aright. When, in 
the midst of his law-studies, the passage of the Stamp Act called at- 
tention to the rights of Englishmen, he turned with responsive mind 
to Coke's learned and cordial comments upon Magna Charta, and 
recognized a master. He probably did not know that one Roger 
Williams served Lord Coke as clerk and amanuensis in his youth, 
and went from his inspiring influence to convey to New England the 
first notion it ever had of the rights of conscience. What Coke did 



48 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

in person for Eoger AVilliams and Rhode Island, Jefferson thought 
he did by his Look for himself, for oMadison, for Henry, for Dabney 
Can, foi; Virginia, for the United States. 

" Coke Lyttleton," he once wrote, "was the universal elementary 
book of law-students ; and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of pro- 
founder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British Constitu- 
Q tion, or in what were called British liberties. Our lawyers were then 
all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth but cun- 
ning learning, got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of 
Blackstone became the student's horn-book, from that moment that 
profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into Toryism, 
and nearly all the J'oung brood of lawyers are now of that line. They 
suppose themselves indeed to be Whigs, because they no longer know 
what Whiggism or Republicanism means." 

When he had made a conquest of Coke, he was desirous of 
ascending to the sources of English law in the ages preceding the 
Norman invasion ; for, as one of his old friends remarked, he 
" hated superficial knowledge." He perceived that law, like the 
other sciences, is progressive ; and that Coke merely marked a stage 
of its progress. He used to compare the laws of England, in their 
course down the ages, with the journey of a traveller, who, when he 
has accomplished a certain distance, stops, looks back over the route 
he has pursued, recalls the business he has done, and, before going 
farther, makes a record of the whole. The most ancient digest of 
this nature is not Coke, but Bracton, an ecclesiastic of Richard I.'s 
reign, who wrote in law-Latin, more puzzling than Lyttleton's law- 
Erench, to read whom the most learned lawyers of Jefferson's time 
required a glossary. This work, too, he read and loved, because it 
was able and luminous, and because it interpreted Magna Charta in 
the spirit and lifetime of the men who wrote and extorted it. He 
went even farther back, and conned with keenest scrutiny the book 
of Alfred's laws, the abrogation of which, by the Conqueror, the 
English so bitterly lamented. He did not fail to note the " pious 
fraud " of the ancient clergy in prefixing to Alfred's laws five chap- 
ters of the Book of Exodus, the twentieth to the twenty-fourth 
inclusive, though they contained laws at direct variance with those 
of the king. Eor a young vestryman, he seems to have had a sharp 
scent for pious frauds. 

Already we observe, in the few relics of his student life which 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 49 

have come down to us, indications of the coming Jeiferson, the 
Thomas Jefferson of American history. The most interesting of all 
those relics is an extract, which he made for a friend in 1814, from 
a book in which, when he was plodding through Bracton and the 
older law-hooks, he was accustomed to enter abstracts. " When I 
was a student of the law," he wrote to this friend, " not half a cen- 
tury ago, after getting through Coke Lyttleton, whose matter can- 
not he abridged, I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing 
what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflec- 
tions on the subject." The abstract which is thus introduced is 
a complete exhibition of Jefferson's mind and mental habits as a 
student of law. We notice, first of all, that it is numbered '-873/' 
which shows us that he studied, as well as lived, pen in hand. Com- 
pact as it is with abbreviations (" pi." for plaintiff, "■ def." for de- 
fendant, " V." for versus, " Blackst." for Blackstone), it fills seven 
and a half octave pages, bristling all over with references, old 
French and law-Latin, which attest his industry and knowledge. 
There is a maturity of tone and completeness of execution in the 
work which would surprise us if it had been done by a lawj'^er of 
many years' standing at the bar. But the most remarkable and 
rare quality which it exhibits is an absolute fearlessness of mind, a, 
loyalty to truth, no matter to what conclusion the evidence may 
lead, and no matter what array of authorities may ha-^e maintained 
the contrary. In a mind that is immature or unformed, a dis- 
regard fox authorities may be mere vanity and presumption ; but 
when the intelligence is superior, trained to investigation, and 
patient of labor, it is the quality to which the whole of the progre'ss 
of our race is due. An independent, superior mind is the most 
precious thing that human nature possesses. 

This young man found it an axiom of the courts, that the Bible 
was a part of the common law of the realm ; and it was in accord- 
ance with this principle that witches were hanged, tithes exacted, 
and labor forbidden on Sunday. In the long document before us he 
denied the fact, and traced the error up to its source in one of the 
ancient law-books, the author of which had converted the words 
ancien scripture (employed in a work still older) into " Holy Scrip- 
ture." The student proved that the words ancien scripture, as 
employed in the original, meant precisely what they seem to mean, 
that is, ancient writings, the old records of the Church. Having 
4 



50 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

thus detected tlie source of the error, lie follows it down through the 
law-books, until he finds it stated with bluntest simplicity by Sir 
]\[atthew Hale, thus: '•'Christianity is parcel of the laws of Eng- 
land." " Sir Matthew Hale," observes this relentless pursuer of 
-error, "quotes no authority, but rests the statement on his own; 
which was good in all cases in which his mind received no bias from 
his bigotry, his superstitions, his visions about sorceries, demons, 
&c. The power of these over him," continues the student, "is ex- 
emplified in his hanging of the witches." From this dictum of Sir 
Matthew Hale he proceeded to the time when it bore fruit in laws 
making it criminal to write against Christianity, or to utter words 
implying disbelief in it. Blackstone incorporated the doctrine into- 
his commentaries, and Mansfield into his decisions. " The essen- 
tial principles of revealed religion," Lord Mansfield had just said 
on the bench, "are part of the common law;" which carried the 
doctrine still farther, while leaving the public, as Jefferson indig- 
nantly remarked, " to find out, at our peril, what, in the opinion of 
the judge, and according to the measure of his foot or his faith, are 
those essential principles of revealed religion obligatory on us as 
part of the common law." And all this without authority to sup- 
port it ; for " this string of authorities," resumes the wrathful stu- 
dent, " all hang on the same hook, a perverted expression of 
Prisot's." 

But this was not enough. He goes back into antiquity, as far as 
the seventh century, when Christianity was introduced intcj England, 
and examines every source of information, from Alfred to Bracton, 
and can find no trf^ce of formal or informal adoption of Christianity 
as part of the common law; dwelling particularly upon the obvious 
fact, that the insertion of the chapters of Exodus among the laws 
of Alfred was " an awkward monkish fabrication ; " and showing 
that the adoption by Alfred of the Ten Commandments was an 
express exclusion of the laws in Exodus, which were suited only to 
the Jews. " The adoption of a part proves the rejection of the rest, 
as municipal law." 

We observe further, in this curious paper, a certain aversion to 
the clergy as an order, joined to a veneration for the Christian 
religion. The fact that Christianity is truth, he remarks, does not 
make it part of the law of England. The Newtonian philosophy' is 
truth, but it is not common law. " Christianity and Newtonianism 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 51 

being reason and verity itself, in tlie opinion of all but infidels and 
Cartesians, they are protected under the wings of the common law 
from the dominion of other sects, but not erected into dominion over 
them." He illustrates the point further by an allusion to tlie con- 
troversy concerning the use of the lancet in medical practice. He 
was among the first to reject bleeding as a common remedy, and 
early forbade his overseers to bleed a negro. An eminent Spanish 
doctor, he says, affirms that the lancet had slain more than the 
sword ; but Dr. Sangredo maintains, that, with plentiful bleedings and 
draughts of warm water, every disease can be cured. Both these 
opinions the common law protected ; but neither of them was com- 
mon law. How palpable all this, he remarks ; but " the English 
judges have piously avoided lifting the veil under which it was 
shrouded," since ''• the alliance between Church and State in Eng- 
land has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the 
clergy, and even bolder than they are." The precepts of the gospel, 
he adds, were designed, by " their benevolent Author," to bear sway 
in the realm of conscience, and only there. 

Old Virginia had had a world of trouble with matters ecclesias- 
tical and religious ; and this is among the reasons why so large a 
number of young men of Jefferson's day were on ill terms with the 
Church. Of ISTew-England intolerance the world has heard enough ; 
but few persons of the present day seem to be aware, that, for every 
outrage committed on the human intellect in New England, a case 
equally atrocious can be found in the annals of Virginia. The Blue 
Laws of Connecticut were a forgery ; but Virginia once had a code 
of Blue Laws that were all too real. 

When Virginia was settled in 1607, let us remember, nothing was 
known of the art of colonization. Shiploads of worthless adven- 
turers were poured out upon the banks of the James, and deprived of 
the usual motives to exertion by being fed from the common stock. 
During the fi.rst five years, there was no such thing as private prop- 
erty in Virginia. Many of the settlers were men of loose character, 
unused to labor, unacquainted with any useful occupation, — dis- 
charged soldiers, and men released from prison, and sent to Virginia 
to get rid of them. Hence the colony often presented a scene of idle- 
ness, waste, and disorder. No returns of value were made to the 
company at home ; and the enterprise, from being highly popular, 
sunk into disrepute, and became the theme of ridicule and burlesque. 



52 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIS". 

It was long before the company in London attributed the ill- 
success of the colony to its true causes. Tlie soil was fertile, the 
climate was healthy, the rivers abounded in fish, and the forests in 
game : why could not a few hundred Englishmen, in the prime and 
vigor of their days, without women and children to support, main- 
tain themselves in a country for which Nature had done so much? 
They cast the whole blame upon the colonists themselves, whom 
they had so unwisely selected, and then deprived of the great natural 
motive to exertion. Accordingly, in the year 1611, the fourth year 
of the colony's existence, they sent over a code of laws for the gov- 
ernment of the people, as severe, bloody, and inquisitorial, as any 
on record. 

By this code it was death to speak disrespectfully of the king, of 
the Trinity, "or against the known articles of the Christian faith." 
Stealin'g was punished with death. If any man uttered an oath, 
" taking the name of God in vain," the punishment for the first 
offence was to be "severe; " for the second, he was to have a "bod- 
kin" (stiletto) thrust through his tongue; and, for the third, he was 
to be tried by court-martial, and, if found guilty, sentenced to death. 
If any man treated a clergyman with disrespect, he was to be pub- 
licly whipped three times, and ask pardon in church before the 
whole congregation on three successive Sundays. Every one was 
obliged to go to church both Sunday morning and afternoon, and 
attend the Sunday exercise in the Catechism ; the penalty for neglect 
being, for the first offence, the loss of a week's jDrovisions ; for the 
second, whipping, and the loss of provision as well ; and, for the 
third, cU'ith ! A washerwoman who should purposely keep back or 
change the linen intrusted to her was to be publicly whipped ; and 
a baker who should cheat in the weight of his bread, for the first 
offence, had his ears cut off; and, for the second, was sent to the 
galleys for a year. To give a better idea of this astounding code, I 
will copy the thirty-third law entire, as a fair specimen of its form 
and spirit : — 

"33. There is not one man nor woman in this colony, now pre- 
sent, or hereafter to arrive, but shall give up an account of his and 
their faith and religion, and repair unto the minister, that, by his 
conference with them, he may understand and gather whether hereto- 
fore they have been sufficiently instructed and catechised in theprin- 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 53 

ciples and grounds of religion ; whose weakness and ignorance herein, 
the minister finding, and advising them, in all love and charity, to 
I'epair often unto him, to receive therein a greater measure of knowl- 
edge ; if the J shall refuse so to repair unto him, and he, the minis- 
ter, give notice thereof unto the governor,- the governor shall cause 
the offender, for his first ^ime of refusal, to be whipped ; for the 
second time, to be whipped twice, and to acknowledge his fault 
upon the sabbath day, in the assembly of the congregation; and, for 
the third time, to be whipped every day until he hath made this 
same acknowledgment, and asked forgiveness for the same ; and 
shall repair unto the minister to be further instructed as aforesaid; 
and upon the sabbath, when the minister shall catechise, and of 
him demand any question concerning his faith and knowledge, he 
shall not refuse to make answer, upon the same peril." 

The punishments for military offences were extremely cruel ; such 
as cutting off the right hand, and having neck and heels bound to- 
gether for thirty successive nights. !N"ot only were the laws severe, 
but there was ordained a complete and effective system for their 
enforcement, and for the detection of offences. Take this rule, for 
example : — 

" It shall be the duty of the captain of the watch, half an hour 
before the divine service morning and evening, to shut the ports 
and place sentinels : and the bells having tolled the last time, he 
shall search all the houses of the town, to command every one, of 
what quality soever, — the sick and hurt excepted, — to repair to 
church ; after which, he shall accompany all the guards with their 
arms — himself being last — into the church, and lay the keys 
before the governor." 

And, as if all this were not enough, a prayer of surprising length 
— it fills more than five octavo pages, closely printed — was sent 
over from England, and required to be said, morning and evening, 
by the captain of the guard, or one of his principal officers. This 
prayer is unique, as I think the reader will allow when he reads 
the following sentence from it : — 

" And whereas we have, by undertaking this plantation, under- 



54 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

gone the reproofs of the base world, inasmuch as many of our owu 
brethren laugh us to scorn, Lord ! we pray thee, fortify us 
against this temptation : let Sanballat and Tobias, Papists and play- 
ers, and such other Amonits and Horonits" — so in the original — 
" the scum and dregs of the earth, let them mock such as help to 
build up the walls of Jerusalem, and they that be filthy let them be 
filthy still, and let such swine still wallow in the mire ; but let not 
the rod of the wicked fall upon the lot of the righteous ; let not 
them put forth their hands to such vanity ; biit let them that fear 
thee rejoice and be glad in thee, and let them know that it is thou, 
Lord ! that reiguest in England, and unto the ends of the world." 

In this strange way the prayer rambles on, page after page, until 
at length it ends with an outburst of mingled patriotic and sectarian 
feeling : — 

" Lord, bless England, our sweet, native country ; save it from 
Popery, this land from heathenism, and both from Atheism." 

This cruel code, which combined the harshest features of the 
Spartan and Mosaic laws, was translated from the martial law of 
Holland, with the addition of some rules which originated in Puritan 
England. It does not appear that it made the colonists more provi- 
dent, or the colony more profitable ; for we still read in the old rec- 
ords of the neglect to plant corn, and of the propensity of many 
settlers to pass their time in sport. One of the best men in the 
colony, an old soldier and a good citizen, entered into a conspiracy 
with some of the earliest comers to overthrow the government, and 
abrogate these cruel laws. The j)lot was detected, and the ringleader 
executed. On another occasion, five men, unable to endure the sys- 
tem, formed a plan for running away to the Spanish colony in 
Florida, which they supposed they could reach in five days. This, 
also, was a capital offence by the new code, and I presume it was 
capitally punished. 

Nor did Virginia escape the witchcraft mania of a later day. In 
fact, the history of the Province contains abundant explanation of 
the peculiar, the intense, the unappeasable hatred of ecclesiastical 
domination which raged in the souls of her more thoughtful sons of 
Jefferson's generation. Young as he was, it could not have been 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 55 

difficult for liira to discover the nnsuitableness of a union of Church 
and State to the circumstances of modern communities ; for the evil 
results of the union in Virginia were never so apparent as just then, 
when he was studying law, from 1762 to 1767. The clergy, indeed, 
had fallen into contempt ; or, as Bishop Meade expresses it, had be- 
come "the laughing-stock" of the colony. Nor does the bishop 
fall into the usual error of attributing this to the " Twopenny Quar- 
rel " between the clergy and the vestrymen, of which Mr. Wirt gives 
us so interesting an account in his Life of Patrick Henry. In 
that dispute, the clergy had both law and justice on their side, as 
Mr. Wirt avows, while exulting in his orator's victory over both. 
As Patrick Henry was always Jefferson's guest when he came to 
Williamsburg, doubtless our student heard his merry friend's own 
version of that affair; and, being himself a vestryman and a young 
man, may have shared the general joy at the defeat of the clergy. 

The clergymen of Virginia were in a position so false and demor- 
alizing, that, as a body, they could not but become indolent and disso- 
lute. The law gave them sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco per 
annum ; which might be worth two hundred pounds a year, if the 
quality were high, and the incumbent lucky and skilful in selling it ; 
or it might be worth sixty pounds a year, if the quality were low and 
the crop superabundant. They were further allowed by law four 
hundred pounds of tobacco, or forty shillings, for preaching a funeral 
sermon ; two hundred pounds of tobacco for a marriage by license ; 
fifty for a marriage by banns ; and a fee for baptism, which custom 
appears to have fixed at a guinea for the rich, and five shillings for 
others. To these revenues was added a glebe sufficient for a good 
farm, which a liberal vestry, we are told, were sometimes kind enough 
to ''stock" with one or two families of slaves. The clergy, ap- 
pointed without much regard to their fitness, were subjected to little 
supervision. The parishes were of great extent, stretching some- 
times as much as thirty mile^ along a river, and jet so thinly inhab- 
ited that they could scarcely furnish a congregation ; and such was 
the scarcity of candidates, that a commissar}'- hesitated to suspend 
a clergyman, even for notorious vice, because the parish might remain 
vacant for two or three years. 

Thus circumstanced, each clergyman behaved according to his dis- 
position. A few of them, men of learning and virtue, did their duty, 
and eked out their slender and changing incomes by taking pupils j 



56 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

and it was tliese few who saved civilization in the colony. Otliers, 
men of rude energy and executive force, pushed the cultivation of 
their glebes, bought more slaves, raised more tobacco, speculated 
sometimes in both, grew rich, reduced their parish duty to the mini- 
mum, and performed that minimum with haste and formality. But 
the greater number lived as idle hangers-on of the wealthier houses, 
assisting their fellow-idlers, the planters, to kill time and run through 
their estates, not always dissolute, but easy-going, self-indulgent, good- 
natured men of the world. It was not very uncommon for the clergy- 
man of a parish to be president of its jockey-club, and personally 
assist in the details of the race-course, such as weighing the men and 
timing the horses. It was common for clergymen .to ride after the 
hounds in fox-hunting; and they were as apt to nail the trophj'' of 
the day's chase to their stable-door as any other men. The names 
of clergymen figured among the patrons of balls, and they were 
rather noted for their skill at cards, v All of which was just as proper 
for clergymen as for planters, and more necessary. But in those days 
the bottle was the vitiating accompaniment of every innocent delight. 
The race must end in a dinner, and the dinner must end under the 
table. The day's hunt must be followed by a night's debauch. The 
cliristening of a child must be the pretext for a day's revel. This 
single element of mischief converted all festal days, all honest mirth, 
all joyous recreation, into injury, shame, and ruin. Nothing can 
make any headway against the potency of wine; for it suspends the 
operation of that within us which enables us to resist, and finally 
destroys it. It vitiates the^ texture of the brain itself, the seat of life, 
and the citadel of all the superior forces. And the wine which flowed 
so freelj' at the planters' tables was Madeira, strongest of wines, so 
enriched by time and two long voyages, that the uncorking of one 
bottle filled a large house with fragrance. 

The tales we read of the clergy of Old Virginia stagger belief, 
though it is clergymen who report them. The reverend rector 
of Wicomio, we read, not approving the bread placed upon the com- 
munion-table, cried out from the altar, in the midst of the service, to 
one of his church-wardens, " George, this bread is not fit for a dog." 
We read of another who was invited after church to dinner at a 
planter's house, where he drank so much that he had to be tied in his 
gig, and a servant sent to lead his horse home. One jolly parson 
comes down to us reeling up and down the porch of a tavern, bawling 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 57 

to the passevs-by to come and drink with him. Another lives in the 
memory of his count}' because he fought a duel within sight of the 
church in which he had formerly officiated. Another is remembered 
as the jovial hunter who died cheering on the hounds to the chase. 
One is spoken of as pocketing annually a hundred dollars, the reve- 
nue of a legacy, for preaching four sermons a year against atheism, 
gambling, racing, and swearing, though himself a notorious swearer, 
racer, and gambler. Another is the hero of a story, that, one day, par- 
son and vestry differed in opinion, quarrelled, and came to blows. 
The parson, a giant in strength, put them to flight. Not content 
with his victory, he renewed the battle on Sunday morning in church, 
when, from the vantage-ground of the pulpit, he hurled at them this 
text from Nehemiah : "And I contended with them, and cursed 
them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair ; " which 
had the keen sting of literal truth. 

One old clergyman is remembered as staggering towards the altar 
at the time of communion, wheu the rector, who was officiating, 
ordered him back to his seat. The monthly dinners of the clergy 
have not yet passed out of mind, to which men would ride for thirty 
or forty miles, and revel far into the night. The court records of 
Hampton show that a clergjanan of that parish was presented by the 
grand jury for drunkenness, and on another occasion for slander ; and 
that, when before the court, he behaved with such insolence as to be 
committed to prison for contempt. Bishop Meade of Virginia, to 
whom the reader is indebted for several of these incidents, relates 
that a lady once came to one of his clergymen, asking re-baptism, as 
she had doubts whether the christening of her infancy was valid. 
The clergyman who performed the ceremonj'-, she said, dined with 
her father that day ; and, after dinner, her father won back from the 
priest at cards the very guinea he had paid him before dinner as his 
baptismal fee. 

The Bishop of London, hearing of these scandals, would sometimes 
urge his commissary, the president of William and Mary College, 
to proceed against the clergy known to be drunkards. The difficulty 
of proof was submitted to the bishop as an excuse for not complying 
with his commands. At what point of intoxication does it become a 
scandal? How shall we decide when a clergyman has been drunk 
enough for ecclesiastical censure ? The Bishop of London sent over 
directions on this point. He thought that if a clergyman sat an 



58 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

hour or more with a company that were drinking strong drink, — 
not wine, — and took the cup as it went the rounds of the table, and 
drank the healths proposed, like the rest of the company, there was 
ground of proceedings. He was also of opinion, that "striking and 
challenging, or threatening to fight, or laying aside any of his gar- 
ments for that purpose, staggering, reeling, vomiting, incoherent, 
impertinent, obscene, or rude talking," was sufficient to justify 
judges in deciding that "the minister's behavior at such a time 
was scandalous, indecent, unbecoming the gravity of a minister." 
Por many years, too, as before observed, the commissary-president 
was himself too fond of the bottle to prosecute a drunken clergyman 
without calling attention to his own habits. 

Pld Virginia was a kind of caricature of Old England in every 
thing. As in England this state of things in the Church called 
forth Wesley and Whitefield; so in Virginia, says John Burk, 
"swarms of Methodists, Moravians, and New-Light Presb^-terians" 
came over the border from Pennsylvania, and pervaded the colony, 
"propagating their doctrines with all the ardor and vehemency of 
gesture and boldness of denunciation which mark the first move- 
ments of a new sect in religion." It was during the boyhood of 
Jefferson that these " swarms " are represented to have darkened 
the air ; and he was old enough to observe the beginnings of the 
bitter conflict between the New Lights (Henry Clay's father was 
one of them) and the royal government. Burk, who was a new 
light of another description, and in full accord with Jefferson in his 
"disestablishment" measures of a later day, informs posterity, that 
when these swarms descended upon Virginia, " government had not 
yet learned the secret of subduing the frenzy of religious bigotry by 
suffering it to waste its powers, and perish by convulsions of its own 
exciting." Nor was the government alone in fault. Many of 
Jefferson's stanchest supporters in the measures by which the 
domination of one sect was terminated gave the governor at 
this period moral and official support in silencing the dissenting 
ministers. 

His own mind, we may be sure, did not arrive at the simple 
solution of this problem all at once. Possibly the young vestryman 
may have himself regarded the swarms as furnishing occasion for 
the interference of a young justice of the peace. The vestryman's 
oath, then used in Virginia, was stringent enough : — 



THE LAW-STUDENT. 59 

" I, Thomas Jefferson, as I do aclinowledge myself a true son of 
the Church of England, so I do believe the articles of faith therein 
professed, and do oblige myself to be conformable to the doctrine 
and discipline therein taught and established ; and that, as a 
vestryman of this church, I will well and truly perform my duty 
therein, being directed by the laws and customs of this country and 
the canons of the Church of England, so far as they will suit our 
present capacity ; and this I shall sincerely do, according to the 
best of my knowledge, skill, and cunniiig, without fear, favor, or 
partiality ; and so help me Grod." 

The time came, as most readers know, when he could not have 
taken this oath, though he never ceased to perform the duties 
which it indicates. As his mind matured, his religion reduced Q 
itself to two articles, — belief in God, and veneration for the char- 
acter and precepts of Jesus Christ ; which has been, during the last 
century and a half, a kind of established religion with minds of 
the cast and grade of his. But he ever lived in the most perfect 
accord with neighbors who believed more than he could, giving 
freely of his time, money, and skill to promote their religious 
objects. It was long before Charlottesville became village enough 
to have a church ; and every preacher that came along occupied 
the court-house, a small, rude edifice, without seats for auditors. 
Old men of the neighborhood used to remember young Jefferson 
riding over to the service on Sunday morning, with a small folding- 
chair of his own contriving hung to his saddle, upon which he sat 
in the court-room. By and b}^, when the Episcopalians were ready 
to build their church, he drew_ tlie plan ; and the edifice which re- 
sulted, Bishop Meade testifies, was better adapted to the purposes 
of a church than many modern buildings much more costly. This 
jcliurch still stands. 

We may say, therefore, that if the church of his youth and 
early manhood did not materially assist in the formation of his char- 
acter, it did not place obstacles in the way of his mental growth. 
He was unrestricted in his reading. It would not have been so if 
he had come to college twenty je&vs sooner. Bishop Meade men- 
tions that when, about 1740, " the first infidel book was imported 
into Virginia," it created such excitement that the governor and 
president of the college wrote to the authorities in England about 



60 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

it. Governor Fauquier would not have taken so much trouble. 
They had such works in Boston as early as 1720, as Franklin 
records, who read and was convinced by them. Jefferson, when a 
law-student, could not have had many books at Williamsburg ; but 
we know that among his books was an edition of Hume's Essays, 
because he speaks of having lent two of the volumes to Patrick 
Henry. Few young men of Jefferson's cast of mind have ever read 
Hume's "Essay on Miracles" without being much influenced by it, 
at least for a time. 

Meanwhile he continued his study of the law with excessive 
ardor, including in his preparation for the bar a vast range of sub- 
jects. Indeed, he went to a rash and perilous excess in study. He 
bore it with impunity, because he inherited a constitution- exception- 
ally strong, because he had horses at command, because, during his 
long vacations at home, he was obliged to attend to his farms and 
improvements. But his friend Madison, led astray by his example 
and precepts, and pursuing his education at Princeton, far from 
horse and home, nearly killed himself with study, and could not 
recover his health for many years. Indeed, though among the very 
best of American citizens, and of infinite value to his country when 
his country most needed its best citizens, James Madison was never 
quite the -man he might have been if he had studied less and 
played more at college. The only fault Jefferson could ever see in 
this most-honored and most-trusted of all the friends of his life, 
was a certain lack of power to stand firm against vehement opposi- 
tion, — a certain lack of stanch, indomitable manhood, — caused, 
perhaps, by the waste of the capital stock of his vitality at Prince- 
ton. Thus Peel was made sensitive to the shallow sarcasm of 
Disraeli. Thus valedictory men pass from the Commencement plat- 
form into oblivion. Thus to-day, throughout Christendom, Igno- 
rance is master, and Knowledge is its hireling; Ignorance controls 
capital, and Knowledge lives on wages ; Ignorance rides in a car- 
riage, and Knowledge trudges on foot; Ignorance edits, and 
Knowledge writes ; the Counting-room orders, and the Sanctum 

; obeys. 

^""Before Jefferson had finished his law-studies, his devotion to 
study drew admiring eyes upon him. Young men asked his advice 
as to what they should read, and parents consulted him concerning 
the education of their sons. He was asked to suggest a course for 



THE LAW-STUDENT. * 61 

Madison, when Madison was seventeen and himself twenty-three. 
He had ah'eady written an outline for a young man about to enter 
upon the study of tlie law; and we may learn from that both what 
he practised himself, and what he laid down for Madison, Monroe, 
and other friends. 

The student, duly prepared for the study of the law by mastering 
Latin and French, and by a course of those "peculiarly engaging 
and delightful " branches, natural philosophy and mathematics, 
must divide each day into portions, and assign to each portion the 
studies most proper for it. Until eight in the morning he should 
confine himself to natural philosophy, morals, and religion; reading 
treatises on astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, agriculture, botanj'', 
international law, moral j)hilosophy, and metaphysics. Religion, 
during these early morning hours, was to be considered under two 
heads, — " natural religion " and " religion sectarian." For informa- 
tion concerning sectarian religion, the student was advised to apply 
to the following sources: "Bible; New Testament ; commentaries 
on them by Middleton in his works, and by Priestley in his ' Corrup- 
tion of Cliristianity,' and 'Early Opinions of Christ;' the sermons 
of Sterne, Massillon, and Bourdaloue." From eight to twelve he 
was to read law, and condense cases, "never using two words where 
one will do." From twelve to one, he was advised to " read poli- 
tics," in Montesquieu, Locke, Priestley, Malthus, and the Par- 
liamentary Debates. In the afternoon he was to relieve his mind 
with history; and, when evening closed in, he might regale him- 
self with literature, criticism, rhetoric, and oratory. No, not regale 
himself, but sit down to a hard and long evening's work, as Jeffer- 
son did himself, keeping it up sometimes till two in the morning. 
The student was recommended in the evening to write criticisms 
of the books he read, to analyze the orations of Demosthenes and 
Cicero, to read good English orations and pleadings with closest 
attention to the secrets of their excellence, to compose original 
essays, and to plead imaginary causes with a friend. 

This was cram, not education. It might make a perfect chief 
clerk, but not a great minister.- It would have diminished Jefferson, 
but for his fiddle, his horses, his farms, his journeys, and his minu- 
ets at the Apollo. Perhaps, however, as he knew his young friends 
better than we do, he was aware that most of theni required no ur- 
ging to take rest and recreation. Madison read this paper too liter- 



f 



62 'life of THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

ally, without putting in the saving clauses ; and Monroe was saved 
by the summons to arms, which, in 1775, drew him and most of his 
fellow-students from William and Mary to the sterner discipline of 
Cambridge, where man could not, just then, be regarded as a crea- 
ture composed of intellect alone. 



CHAPTER X. 



STAMP-ACT SCENES. 



Passing events are an important educating force to attentive 
minds. Perhaps they educate us more than all things else, for we 
cannot easily get off our lesson for a single day ; and, once in a 
generation, occur electric events which rouse and inform the minds 
of whole nations at once.' What person in the United States so 
unteachably dull as to have been no more of a human being in 1865 
than he was in 1861 ! But, in all recent history, I know of no example 
more striking of the greater good that results from great evil, than 
the Stamp-act agitation of 1764 to 1766, which began the de-colo- 
nization — the independent public life — of North America. It so 
chanced that our student was in the thick of events at the time. It 
was the Stamp Act which changed old Coke's comments on ]\[agna 
Charta from dead law into living gospel ; and, what the Staiup Act 
did for Jefferson's mind, it did for the mind of his country. It 
converted the fundamental principles of right into the familiar 
things of daily speech, and infused the essence of old Coke into a 
million minds that never heard his name. He had watched with 
interest, as he himself records, the series of events by which impe- 
rial Chatham had given Great Britain her opportunity of empire by 
making her supreme in Korth America; and he was now to follow, 
with interest more intense and more intelligent, the events by which 
an ignorant king and a corrupt ruling class threw England's 
magnificent chance away, and caused her to lapse into an island 
again. 

His friend, Patrick Henry, had been coming and going during 
these student years ; dropping in when the General Court met in 
the autumn, and riding homeward, with a book or two of Jefferson's 
in his saddle-bags, when the court adjourned over till the spring; 

63 



G4 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

then returning with the books unread. The wondrous eloquence 
which he had displayed iu the Parsons Case in December, 17G3J does 
not seem to have been generally known in Williamsburg in 1764; 
for he moved about the streets and public places unrecognized, though 
not unmarked. It would not have been extraordinary if our young 
student had been a little ashamed of his oddity of a guest as they 
walked together towards the Capitol, at the time when the young 
ladies were abroad, — Sukey Potter, Betsy Moore, Judy Burwell, and 
the rest ; for Henry's dress was coarse, worn, and countrified, and 
he walked with such an air of thoughtless unconcern, that he was 
taken bj- some for an idiot. But he had a cause to plead that winter ; 
and when he sat down he had become '' Mr. Henry " to all Williams- 
burg. You will observe in the memorials of Old Virginia, from 1765 
to 1800, that, wdioever else may be named without a prefix of honor, 
this "forest-born Demosthenes," as Byron styled him, is generally 
styled Mr. Henry. To Washington, to Jefferson, to Madison, to all 
that circle of eminent men, he ever remained '"'Mr. Henry." On 
that day in 1764 he gave such an exhibition of his power, that, dur- 
ing the next session of the House of Burgesses, a vacancy was made 
for him, and he was elected to a seat. The up-country yeomen, 
whose idol he had become, gladlj'' gave their votes to such a man, 
when the Stamp Act was expected to be a topic of debate. 

And so, in May, 1765, the new member was in Williamsburg to 
take his seat, a guest again of his young friend Jefferson. He sat, 
day after day, waiting for some of the older members to open the 
subject. But no one seemed to know just what to do. A year be- 
fore the House had gently denied the right of Parliament to tax the 
colonies, and softly remonstrated against the threatened measure ; 
but as the act had been jDassed, in spite of their objections, what 
more could a loyal colony do ? No one thought of formal resistance, 
and remonstrance had failed. What else ? What next ? However 
frequently the two friends may have conversed upon this perplexity, 
it was Patrick Henry, who, to use his own words, " alone, unadvised, 
and unassisted," hit upon the proper expedient. 

Only three daj's of the session remained. On the blank leaf of 
ail old Coke upon Lyttleton — perhaps Jefferson's own copy — 
the new member wrote his celebrated five resolutions, of this purport : 
We, Englishmen, living in America, have all the rights of English- 
men living in England ; the chief of which is, that we can only be 



STAIMP-ACT SCENES. . 65 

taxed by our own representatives ; and any attempt to tax us other- 
wise meuaces British liberty on both continents. In all probability, 
Jefferson knew that something of the kind was intended on that 
memorable day, for he was present in the House. There was no gal- 
lery then, nor any other provision for spectators ; but there could be 
no objection to the friend and relative of so many members standing 
in the doorway between the lobby and the chamber ; and there he 
took his stand. He saw his tall, gaunt, coarsely-attired guest rise in 
his awkward waj^-, and break with stammering tongue the silence 
wliich had brooded over the loudest debates, as week after week of 
the session had passed. He observed, and felt too, the thrill which 
ran tlirough the House at the mere introduction of a subject with 
which every mind was surcharged, and marked the rising tide of 
feeling as the reading of the resolutions went on, until the climax of 
audacity was reached in the last clause of the last. How moderate, 
how tame, tha words seem to us ! " Every attempt to invest such 
power (of taxation) in any person or persons whatever, other than 
the General Assembly aforesaid, has a manifest tendency to destroy 
British and American freedom." "Ravishing words to the Whig 
members from Albemarle and the other western counties. Sound 
as old Coke himself, in the judgment of our spell-bound listener in 
the doorway. Words of fearful import to the Tory lords of the 
eastern counties. Not approved, as yet, by George Wythe, nor by 
Pe3''ton Randolph, whom the student held in so much honor. 

When the reading was finished, he heard his friend utter the 
opening sentences of his speech, with faltering tongue as usual, and 
giving little promise of the strains that were to follow. But it was 
the nature of this great genius, as of all genius, to rise to the occa- 
sion. Soon Jefferson saw him stand erect, and, swinging free of all 
impediments, launch into the tide of his oration; every eye capti- 
vated by the large and sweeping grace of his gesticulation ; every 
ear charmed with the swelling music of his voice ; every mind 
thrilled or stung by the vivid epigrams into which he condensed his 
opinions. He never had a listener so formed to be held captive by 
him as the student at the lobby door, who, as a boy, had found the 
oratory of the Indian chief so impressive, and could not now resist a 
slurring translation of Ossian's majestic phrases. After the lapse of 
fifty-nine years, he still spoke of this great day with enthusiasm, and 
described anew the closing moment of Henry's speech, when the 

6 



66 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOl^. 

orator, interrupted by cries of treason, uttered the well-known words 
of defiance, " If this be treason, malie the most of it ! " 

The debate which followed Mr. Henry's opening speech, was, as 
Jefferson has recorded, "most bloody." It is impossible for a reader 
of this generation to conceive the mixture of fondness, pride^ and 
veneration with which these colonists regarded the mother country, 
its parliament and king, its cluirch and its literature, and all the 
glorious names and events of its history. Whig as Jefferson was by 
nature and conviction, he could not give up England as long as there 
was any hope of a just union with her. What, then, must have 
been the feelings of the Tories of the House, — Tories by nature 
and by party, — upon hearing this yeoman from the west speak of 
the natural rights of man in the spirit of a Sidney, and use language 
in reference to the king which sounded to them like the prelude to 
an assassin's stab? They had to make a stand, too, for their posi- 
tion as leaders of the House, unquestioned for a century. To the 
matter of the resolutions no one objected. All that Wythe, Pendle- 
ton, Bland, and Peyton Pandolph could urge against them was, that 
they were unbecoming and unnecessary. The House had already 
remonstrated without effect, and it became a loyal people to submit. 
*' Torrents of sublime eloquence " from Patrick Henry, as Jefferson 
observes, swept away their arguments ; and the resolutions were car- 
ried ; the last one, however, by only a single voice. Standing in the 
door-way, the student watched the taking of the vote on the last 
resolution, upon which the contest had been hottest. When the 
result had been declared, Peyton Randolph, the king's attorney- 
general, brushed past him, saying, as he entered the lobby, "By 
God ! I would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote." 

Doubtless the young gentlemen went home exulting. Patrick 
Henry, unused to the artifices of legislation, and always impatient 
of detail, supposing now that the work for which he had come to 
Williamsburg was done, mounted that very evening and rode away. 
Jefterson, perhaps, was not too sure of this ; for the next morning, 
some time before the hour of meeting, he wa,s again at the Capitol, 
and in the Burgesses' Chamber. His' uncle, Colonel Peter Randolph, 
one of the Tory members, came in, and, sitting down at the clerk's 
table, began to turn over the journals of the House. Pie had a dim 
recollection, he said, of a resolution of the House, many years ago, 
having been expunged ! He was trying to find the record of the 



STAMP-ACT SCEiSTES. 67 

transaction. He wanted a precedent. The student of law looked 
over his shoulder, as he turned the leaves ; a group of members 
standing near, in trepidation at the thought of yesterday's doings. 
The House-hell rang ; the House convened ; the student resumed 
his stand in the doorway. A motion was made to expunge the last 
resolution of yesterday's series; and, in the absence of the mighty 
orator whose eloquence had yesterday(made the dull intelligent and ^ 
the timid brave^the motion was carried, and the resolution was 
expunged. 

We hear no more from Jefferson of his making the tour of Europe, 
after the Stamp Act. Perhaps, although the odious measure was 
repealed a year after its passage, to the boundless joy of the people, 
these events lessened his desire to visit the land of his forefathers. 
He begins now to speak with some asperity of the Tory leaders in 
England. In abstracting cases, he detects the political bias of the o 
judge in his rulings. As Braddock's defeat revealed to the colonists 
that red-coats were not invincible, so did the Stamp Act break the 
enchantment of distance, and show some of them that British judges 
and law-makers could be subservient to power. Nor was he rich 
enough for such a luxury as foreign travel, and by this time he must 
have discovered the fact. His farms did not yield an income of 
more than four hundred pounds sterling per annum. 

But a young gentleman may take a little recreation in travel, with- 
out going to the ends of the earth. The system of inoculation for 
the small-pox was still a topic with physicians and persons inter- 
ested in medical science. Jefferson was, all his life, a curious inquirer 
in such subjects ; and he became, by and by, a not unskilful sur- 
geon, — one who could, upon an emergency, sew up an ugly wound, 
or set a negro's broken leg. The delicac}' of touch, and dexterity of 
hand, that he possessed, joined to his patience in investigation and 
fearlessness of precedent, could have made him a master in surgery. 
Convinced of the utility of inoculation, then performed by Dr. Ship- 
pen of Philadelphia, he availed himself of this pretext, in the spring 
of 1766, to take a journey northward, and see eomething of the world 
that lay beyond the boundaries of Virginia. At twenty-three he 
bad never been out of his native Province. 

This journey he made, not on horseback, but in a one-horse chaise. 
Readers familiar with the road will not be at a loss to imagine the 
time he must have had in crossing so many wide and brimming 



68 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

riyers over wliicli we now thunder with so much ease, — the York, 
■Pamunkey, Rappahannock, Potomac, Pawtuxent, Patapsco, Susque- 
hanna, Delaware, Passaic, Hackensack, and Hudson, without count- 
ing fifty smaller streams, and those wide shallows that indent the 
sliores of Chesapeake Bay, — all to be forded, or crossed in a ferry- 
boat propelled by poles or oars. It argues ill for his habits that his 
horse ran away with him twice the first day, for the animal evidently 
wanted exercise. The second he rode in a drenching rain from 
morning till night, without comiug to a habitation in which he could 
take shelter. The third day, in fording the swollen Pamunkey, he 
was nearly drowned. After getting beyond this river, he came to 
a more inhabited region, where he visited old college friends at their 
homes, to his great content. At Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, 
then a town of a thousand inhabitants, and of somewhat more im- 
portance than Williamsburg, he found the people in the midst of 
public rejoicings over the repeal of the Stamp Act. The Maryland 
Assembly was in session. It was no such courteous and dignified 
body, he told his friend Page, as the House of Burgesses of Virginia. 
Business was conducted in a more informal manner; so loosely, in 
fact, as to move the young Virginian to laughter. He was struck, 
however, with the beauty and convenience of the situation, — "the 
largest vessels, those of four hundred hogsheads, being able to brush 
against the sides of the dock." 

At Philadelphia the inoculation was jjerformed. When he recov- 
ered, he continued his journey to the clean, crooked, little, cobble- 
stoned, half-Dutch city, so green and shady, that covered the last mile 
of beautiful Manhattan Island, — a place then of nearly twenty thou- 
sand inhabitants. Of his stay in New York we know only one trifling 
fact. He chanced to take lodgings in a house where a young gen- 
tleman of his own age from Massachusetts, named Elbridge Gerry, 
was staying. They became acquainted with one another well enough 
to remember the chance meeting, when, nine years after, they met 
in "the Congress" at Philadelphia. They remained friends and 
political allies for fifty years. It was perhaps on his return from 
this journey that an incident occurred, which, in his old age, he used 
to relate with so much glee. On his way through Virginia he 
stopped at a tavern, the landlady of which had just returned from 
the funeral of a young man of that neighborhood, whom she extolled 
and lamented with much feeling. "But, Mr. Jefferson," said she, 



' STAMP-ACT SCENES. 69 

"we have the consolation of knowing that every thing was done for 
him that could be done. He was bled no less than six and twenty 
times." 

And so sped these happy, laborious years of preparation for the 
bar. Early in the year 1767, about the time of his twenty-fourth 
birthday, he was admitted ; and he began at once the practice of his 
profession. He had not to wait for business. One of his existing O 
account-books shows, that, in this first year of his practice, he was 
employed in sixty-eight cases before the Greneral Court of the Prov- 
ince, besides county and office business. 



CHAPTEE XI. 

LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 

He was admitted to the bar at a fortunate time for a profession 
that tlirives most wlien tbe community has ceased to thrive. 

During tlie flush period, when Virginia seemed to be so flourish- 
ing because she was living on her capital, — the virgin soil of the 
river valleys, — the people indulged to the full that antipathy to 
lawyers which appears natural to the rustic mind. Far back in 
Charles I.'s reign, in 1642, the Assembly had passed a law, that 
" all mercenary attorneys be wholly expelled " from the courts of 
Virginia; meaning by "mercenary attorneys," paid attorneys. 
The reason assigned for this act was, that "many troublesome suits 
are multiplied by the unskilfulness and covetousness of attorneys, 
who have more intended their own profit and their inordinate lucre 
than the good and benefit of their clients." The very tautologies of 
this law seem to betray the trembling eagerness of the honest bur- 
gess who drew it. 

For nearly eleven years not a lawyer in Virginia could lawfully 
take a fee for serving a client in court. But, of course, the rogues 
evaded the act ; and this the Assembly tried to prevent by enacting 
a supplement, to the eflect that no attorney should " take any rec- 
ompense, directly or indirectly," for any legal service ; but, in case 
a judge should perceive that a man was likely to lose his cause 
merely by his inability to plead it, he was " to appoint some fitt man 
out of the people " to plead it for him, who was to be paid such a 
fee as the court should deem just. The plan was plausible, but it 
did not answer. The act was repealed ; and such attorneys as were 
licensed were bound by a stringent oath not to oppress clients nor 
foment suits. But no sooner were the lawyers in the courts again, 
than they behaved in such a way as to become more odious than 
70 



LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINLi. 71 

ever. Tlien the House of Burgesses — in 1657, liis Highness, O 
Oliver Cromwell, being Lord Protector — took up the s\ibject anew, 
and debated this question : " Shall we attempt a regulation or totall 
ejection of lawyers ?" The House decided for "totall ejection," and 
framed a law which they thought would be too much even for a 
lawyer's cunning to evade: "Noe person or persons within this 
coUony, either lawyers or any other," shall plead for pay in a court, 
nor give counsel in any cause or controversy, for any kind of com- 
pensation, under a penalty of five thousand pounds of tobacco for 
every offence ; " and because the breakers thereof, through their 
subtillit}'' cannot easily be discerned," every man pleading for another 
must take an oath that he is not " a breaker of the act." 

But the governor and council had a veto on the acts of the 
Assembly. It reveals to us the intensity of the odium in which law- 
yers were held, that the governor and council did not directly veto 
so preposterous a law, but attempted to parry it by sending this 
message : " The governor and council will consent to this proposi- 
tion so farr as it shall be agreeable to Magna Charta." The Assem- • 
bly made " humble reply," that they had considered Magna Charta, 
but found nothing therein applicable to the case ; and as law_yers had 
been kept out of the courts for more than ten years, by the act of a for- 
mer House, "wee humbly conceive that wee have no less power" to 
eject them again. The humble reply seems to have convinced the 
governor and council ; for the law appears in the statutes, and 
remained in force for twenty-three years ! 

But our complicated modern world cannot do without lawyers, not 
even simple, rustic Old Virginia. And accordingly in 1680, thirty- O 
second of Charles II., we find a House of Burgesses — farmers to a 
a man — enacting the lawyers back again, and giving good reasons 
therefore : " Whereas all courts in this country are many tj^mes hin- 
dered and troubled in their judicial proceedings by the impertinent 
discourses of many busy and ignorant men, who will pretend to as- 
sist their friend in the business, and to clear the matter more plainly 
to ^he court, although never desired or requested thereunto by 
the person whome they pretended to assist, and many tyuies to the 
destruction of his cause, and the great trouble and hindrance of the 
court ; for prevention whereof to the future, Bee it enacted," that no 
one shall in future presume to plead in any court of this colony 
without license " first obtained and had," under penalties of six 



r2 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

hundred or of. two thousand pounds of tobacco, according to the 
dignity of the court in which the offence shall have been committed. 

This act terminated a controversy which had lasted thirty-eight 
years ; and the Assembly, having admitted lawyers, fixed their com- 
pensation at rates which were meant to be liberal. For conducting 
a cause in the chief court of the colony an attorney was allowed to 
charge five hundred pounds of tobacco, and, in the county courts, 
one hundred and fifty pounds, — splendid compensation, if tobacco 
could only have been kept up to a shilling a pound. 

When John Tiolfe, not yet husband of Pocahontas, planted the 
first tobacco seed in Jamestown, in 1612, good tobacco sold in Lon- 
don docks at five shillings a pound, or two hundred and fifty pounds 
sterling for a hogshead of a thousand pounds' weight. Fatal facility 
i of money-making! It was this that diverted all labor, capital, and 
I enterprise into one channel, and caused that first shipload of 
negroes in the James River to be so welcome. The planter could 
have but one object, — to get more slaves in order to raise more 
tobacco. Hence, the price was ever on the decline, drooping first 
from shillings to pence, and then going down the scale of pence, 
until it remained for some years at an average of about two pence a 
pound in Virginia, and three pence in London. In Virginia, it 
often fell below two pence ; as, during brief periods of scarcity, it 
w^ould rise to six pence and seven pence. A fee of five hundred 
pounds of tobacco, from 1680 to 1750, might average about three 
guineas ; and a fee of one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, 
something less than one guinea. These sums, small as they seem 
to us, sufficed to create the profession of the law in Virginia, and to 
draw into it a few of the younger sons of great planters, and the 
eldest sons of western yeomen. 

But these fees were the highest that could be charged. It is evi- 
dent from Jefferson's own books, that his usual compensation was 
somewhat less; for he records that, during his first year at the bar, 
1767, he was employed in sixtj'-eight cases before the General 
Court, — business that must have brought with it many cases in 
county courts ; but his entire emolument for the year was a little 
more than two hundred pounds sterling ; or in the currency of 
Virginia, as set down by himself with Jeffersonian exactness, 
^ £293. 4s. 5|c?. From the accounts of later years, I should conclude 
that his cases, one with another, yielded him about one pound ster- 



LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 73 

ling profit ; for the number of his cases and the number of pounds of 
his law income are never far from equal, in the busier years of his 
practice. Translating the pounds of tliat period into the dollars of 
this, it was as though a lawyer of the present day should receive 
fifty dollars for arguing a cause before the Supreme Court of the 
United States, ten dollars for a cause before a local court, two dol- 
lars for a verbal opinion, and five for a written one. As late as 1792, 
when lawyers' fees were again fixed by law in Virginia, the most 
eminent lawyer in the State could not legally charge, for the most 
elaborate written opinion on the most abstruse question relating to 
real estate, more than sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents ;' and 
when lawyers attended at a distance from their homes, they could 
charge for their time not more than three dollars and fifty-eight 
cents per day. Well might Mr. Webster say, that, in that age, 
la wye ^' worked hard, lived well, and died poor." 

Nevertheless, it was a good time for a lawyer when Jeiferson 
began to practise ; for he could make up for the smallness of his 
fees by the number of his cases. Everybody almost was in law. 
After a hundred years of profusion, pay-day, -postponed by mort- 
gage and other devices, was at hand ; and the shadow of coming 
ruin darkened many a stately house. 

Old Virginia is a pathetic chapter in Political Economy. Old 
Virginia, indeed ! She reached decrepitude while contemporary 
communities were enjoying the first vigor of youth ; while Nev^ 
York was executing the task which Virginia's George Washington 
had suggested and foretold, that of connecting the waters of the 
great West with the ocean ; while New England was careering 
gayly over the sea, following the whale to his most distant retreat, 
and feeding belligerent nations with her superabundance. One 
little century of seeming prosperity; three generations of spend- 
thrifts; then the lawyer and the sheriff! Nothing was invested, 
nothing was saved for the future. Tliere were no manufactures, no 
commerce, no towns, no internal trade, no great middle class. As fast 
as that virgin richness of soil could be converted into tobacco, and sold 
in London docks, the proceeds were expended in vast, ugly man- 
sions, heavy furniture, costly apparel, Madeira wine, fine horses, 
huge coaches, and more slaves. The planters lived as though 
virgin soil were revenue, not capital. They tried to maintain in 
Virginia the lordly style of English grandees, without any Birming- 



74 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIST. 

Iiam, Staffordshire, Sheffield, or London docks, to pay for it. Their 
short-lived prosperity consisted of three elements, — virgin soil, low- 
priced slaves, high-priced tobacco. The virgin soil was rapidly 
exhausted ; the price of negroes was always on the increase ; and the 
price of tobacco was always tending downward. Their sole chance 
of founding a stable commonwealth was to invest the proceeds of 
their tobacco in something that would absorb their labor and yield 
them profit when the soil would no longer produce tobacco. 

But their laborers were ignorant slaves, the possession of whom 
destroyed their energy, swelled their pride, and dulled their under- 
standings. Yirginia's case was hopeless from the day on which that 
Dutch ship landed the first twenty slaves ; and, when the time of 
reckoning came, the people had nothing to show for their long occu- 
pation of one of the finest estates in the world, except great hordes 
of negroes, breeding with the rapidity of rabbits; upon whose 
annual increase Virginia subsisted, until the most glorious and 
beneficial of all wars set the white race free, and gave Virginia her 
second opportunity. 

All this was nobody's fault. It was a combination of circum- 
stances against which the unenlightened human nature of that period 
could not possibly have made head. Few men saw anything wrong 
in slavery. No man knew much about the laws that control the 
prosperity of States. No man understood the science of agriculture. 
Every one with whom those proud and thoughtless planters dealt 
plundered them; and the mother country discouraged every attempt 
of the colonists to manufacture their own supplies. There were so 
many charges upon tobacco, in its course from the planter's packing- 
house to the consumer's pipe, that it was no very uncommon thing, 
in dull years, for the planter to receive from his agent in London, in 
return for his hogsheads of tobacco, not a pleasant sum of money, 
nor even a box of clothes, but a bill of charges which the price of 
the tobacco had not covered. One of the hardships of which the 
clergy complained was, tliat they did not "dare" to send their 
tobacco to London, for fear of being brought in debt by it, but had 
to sell it on the spot to speculators much below the London price. 
The old Virginia laws and records so abound in tobacco information, 
that we can follow a hogshead of tobacco from its native plantation 
on the James to the shop of tlie tobacconist in London. 

In the absence of farm vehicles; — many planters who kept a coach. 



LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 75 

had no wagons, — eacla hogshead was attached to a pair of shafts 
with a horse between them, and "rolled" to a shed on the bank of 
the stream. When a ship arrived in the river from London, it 
anchored opposite each plantation which it served, and set ashore 
the portion of the cargo belonging to it; continuing its upward 
course until the hold was empty. Then, descending the river, it 
stopped at the different plantations, taking in from each its hogs- 
heads of tobacco ; and the captain receiving long lists of articles to 
be bought in London with the proceeds of the tobacco. The rivers 
of Virginia, particularly the Potomac and the James, are wide and 
shallow, with a deep channel far from either shore ; so that the 
transfer of the tobacco from the shore to the ship, in the general 
absence of landings, was troublesome and costly. To this day, as 
readers remember, the piers on the James present to the wondering 
passenger from the North a stretch of pine planks, from an eighth to 
half a mile long. The ship is full at length, drops down past 
Newport News, salutes the fort upon Old Point Comfort, and glides 
out between the capes into the ocean. 

Suppose her now safe in London docks, say about the year 1735, 
the middle of the prosperous period, when the great houses were 
building in Virginia, with stabling for "a hundred horses," and pre- 
text of work for " a hundred servants." By the time she is fast at 
her berth, the vultures have alighted upon her deck. Two "land- 
waiters" represent the authorities of the custom-house, and are 
sworn to see that the king gets his own. A personage called the 
"ship's husband" is not long behind them. He, representing the 
merchant to whom the tobacco is consigned, would naturally be 
the antagonist of the land-waiters ; but he is only too glad to establish 
an understanding with them. And behind each of these two powers 
there is a train of hangers-on, hungry for a morsel of the prey. 
There is already a charge of two pounds for freight upon each hogs- 
head. As soon as the ship is reported at the custom-house, the 
king demands his "old subsidy" of three farthings upon every 
pound of tobacco on board, — more than three pounds sterling on a 
hogshead of a thousand pounds weight. The "duty" of five and 
one-third pence per pound has next to be calculated, and a bond 
given for its payment when the tobacco is sold for home consump- 
tion. The purchaser, it is true, pays these duties ; but the planter is 
responsible and bound for the payment. 



T6 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Then there is a continuous fire of petty charges at each unfor- 
tunate hogshead, some of which it is difficult now to explain. 
I copy the following items from an agent's bill of 1733 : " primage, 
6d;" "wharfage and lighterage, 6cZ.;" "Mr, Perry, M.;" "hus- 
banding the ship, 4c?.;" "watching and drink, 3(3?.;" "entry in- 
wards and bonds, GtZ.;" "land-waiters' fees, 3c?.;" " dinners,,^break- 
fasts to the husband and officers while landing the ship, with other 
incident expenses, 9fZ.;" "entry outwards and searchers, 8cZ.;" 
"cocket* money, etc., 3c?.;" "debentures one with another, 13(Z.; " 
"cooperage on board, 2c?.;" "ditto, landing. Is.;" " ditto outwards, 
9c?.;" "refusing and hoops. Id.;" "porterage, rehousing, and 
extraordinary rummaging, Qd. ;" "weighing and shipping, Qd.;" 
"wharfage and lighterage outwards, 6d.;'' "cartage. Is.;" "ware- 
house rent for three months. Is. 6d.;" "brokerage, 2s.;" "postage, 
as charged by the post-office ; " " agent's commission, 2^ per cent." 
In other bills I observe such words as " suttle," f and the old famil- 
iar " tare " and " tret." 

Besides these vexatious charges, each of which could be a pretext 
for fraud, the London agent had other modes of despoiling the 
planter who w^as quaffing his Madeira, or chasing the fox, three 
thousand miles away. Two pounds of tobacco were allowed to be 
taken from each hogshead for a sample ; but a cooper who knew 
what was due to a British merchant and to himself could draw eight 
pounds as well as two ; and a weigher who had been previously 
"seen" could mark down the weight of a hogshead two hundred 
pounds or ten pounds, according to the size of the hogshead ; leaving 
the planter to decide whether his scales, or 'those of the London 
custom-house, were untrustworthy. In a word, all those fraudulent 
devices complained of by honest merchants in the bad days of the 
New York custom-house were familiar in the custom-house of Lon- 
don in 1733 ; and the frauds were concealed by precisely the same 
means. Upon the arrival of a ship, the merchant to whom the 
tobacco was consigned would apply for the services of certain land- 
waiters, " ivhose friendship he could rely vpon,^' to superintend the 
landing of his tobacco. Perhaps they were engaged at the time. 

* Cocket. — A scroll of parchment, sealed and delivered by the officers of the custom- 
house to merchants, as a warrant that their merchandise is entered. — Webster. 

t Sl'Ttle. — Suttle- weight, in commerce, is the weight when the tare has been deducted, 
and tret has yet to be allowed. — Wkbstkk. 



LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 77 

Then lie delayed landing his tobacco till they were at leisure. The 
rest can be imagined. The weighers, the coopers, and the " ship's 
husband " understand one another ; and " if," as an old remon- 
strance has it, " any two of them agree in their account, the third 
alters his book to make it agree with theirs." * We read, besides, 
of British merchants sweeping the refuse of their warehouses into 
casks, putting a little good tobacco at the top and bottom ; and, after 
getting a drawback of duty from tlieir own government, sending 
this mass of dust and stalks to defraud a foreign countr3^ In 1750, 
when tobacco yielded the British government one hundred and fifty 
thousand pounds sterling per annum, it gave the planter an average 
profit of one pound sterling per hogshead. 

The same factors who sold the Virginia tobacco were usually 
charged to purchase the merchandise which the planters required. 
Doubtless many of them performed both duties with sufficient cor- 
rectness ; but, down to the Revolution, it was a standing complaint 
with the planters, that their tobacco brought them less, and their 
merchandise cost them more, than they had expected. Readers 
remember the emphatic expostulations of General Washington on 
both these points. The very ships that carried the tobacco, and 
brought back the merchandise, were nearly all owned in London. 
When a Yankee merchant had a prosperous year, or made a lucky 
voyage, he built another schooner ; so that, when Jefferson made his 
first bow to a jurv, in 1767, New England owned seven-eighths of the 
shipping that frequented New-England ports. But of all the great 
fleet trading with Virginia, — about three hundred vessels in 1767, — 
seven-eighths belonged to British merchants. The Yankee's new 
schooner proved a better investment than the Virginian's " likely 
negro wenches," whom the Yankee's schooner brought for him from 
the coast of Guinea ; and the Virginian's pipes of Madeira con- 
sumed his acres, while the Yankee, with his New-England rum, 
added acres to his estate. 

How little the planters foresaw the desolation of their Province is 
affectingly attested by many of the relics of their brief affluence. 
They built tlieir parish churches to last centuries, like the churches 
to which they were accustomed " at home." In neighborhoods 



* Case of the Tobacco-Planters of Virginia, as represented by themselves : signed by the 
Presiduut of the Council and Speaker of the House of Burgesses. London. 1733. 



78 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

where now a congregation of fifty persons co^^^d not be collected, 
there are the ruins of churches that were evidently built for the 
accommodation of numerous and wealthy communities ; a forest, in 
some instances, has grown up all around them, making it difficult to 
get near the imperishable walls. Sometimes the wooden roof has 
fallen in, and one huge tree, rooted among the monumental slabs of 
the middle aisle, has filled all the interior. Other old churches long 
stood solitary in old fields, the roof sound, but the door standing 
open, in which the beasts found nightly shelter, and into which the 
passing horseman rode and sat on his horse before the altar till the 
storm passed. Others have been used by the farmers as wagon- 
houses, by fishermen to hang their seines in, by gatherers of turpen- 
tine as storehouses. One was a distillery, and another was a barn. 
A poor drunken wretcli reeled for shelter into an abandoned church 
of Chesterfield County, — the county of the first Jeifersons ; and 
he died in a drunken sleep at the foot of the reading-desk, where he 
lay undiscovered until his face was devoured by rats. An ancient 
font was found doing duty as a tavern punch-bowl ; and a tomb- 
stone, which served as the floor of an oven, used to print memorial 
words upon loaves of bread. Fragments of richly-colored altar- 
pieces, fine pulpit-cloths, and pieces of old carving, used to be 
preserved in farm-houses, and shown to visitors. When the late 
Bishop Meade began his rounds, forty years ago, elderly people 
would bring to him sets of communion plate and single vessels, 
which had once belonged to the parish church, long deserted, and 
beg him to take charge of them. 

Those pretty girls of the Apollo, who turned young Jefferson's head 
in 1762, and most of the other bright spirits of that generation, — 
where does their dust repose ? In cemeteries so densely covered 
with trees and tangled shrubbery, that no traces of their tombstones 
can be discovered; in cemeteries over which the plough and the har- 
row pass ; in cemeteries through the walls of which some stream 
has broken, and where the bones and skulls of the dead may be 
seen afloat upon the slime. 

The suddenness of the collapse was most remarkable. Westmore- 
land County, the birthplace of Washington, Madison, Monroe, and 
Marshall, called absurdly enough "the Athens of Virginia," was 
still the most polite and wealthy region of Virginia when Thomas 
Jefferson was a young lawyer. In thirty years it became waste and 



LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINLA.. 79 

desolate. A picket-guard in 1813, posted on the Potomac to watch 
for the expected British fleet, were seeking one day a place to 
encamp, when they came upon an old church, the condition of which 
revealed at once the completeness and the recentness of the ruin. 
It stood in a lonely dell, where the silence was broken only by the 
breeze whispering through the pines and cedars and dense shrub- 
bery that closed the entrance. Huge oaks, standing near the walls, 
enveloped the roof with their long, interlacing branches. The doors 
all stood wide open ; the windows were broken ; the roof was rotten, 
and had partly fallen in ; and a giant pine, iiprooted by a tempest, 
was lying against the front, choking up the principal door. The 
churchyard, which was extensive, and enclosed by a high brick wall 
of costly structure, was densely covered all over with^ tombstones 
and monuments ; many of which, though they bore names once held 
in honor throughout Virginia, were broken to pieces, or prostrate, 
with brambles and weeds growing thick and tangled between them 
everywhere. The parish had been important enough to have a 
separate building for a vestry just outside the churchyard wall. 
This had rotted away from its chimney, which stood erect in a mass 
of ruin. 

With some difficulty the soldiers forced their way through the 
fine old porch, between massive doors, into the church. What a 
picture of desolation was disclosed'! The roof, rotted away at the 
corners, had let in for years the snow and rain, staining and sj)oiling 
the interior. The galleries, where in the olden time the grandees 
of the parish sat, in their square, high pews, were sloping and lean- 
ing down upon the peivs on the floor, and on one side had quite 
fallen out. The remains of the great Bible still lay open on the 
desk, and the tattered canvas which hung from the walls showed 
traces of the Creed and Commandments which had once been written 
upon it. The marble font was gone : it was a punch-bowl, the com- 
mander of the picket was told. The communion-table, which had 
been a superb piece of work, of antique pattern, with a heavy wal- 
nut top, was in its place, but roughened and stained by exposure. 
It was afterwards used as a chopping-block. The brick aisles 
showed that the church was the resort of animals, and the wooden 
ceiling was alive with squirrels and snakes. The few inhabitants 
of the vicinity — white trash — held the old church and its wilder- 
ness of graves in dread, and scarcely dared enter the tangled dell 



80 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

in which they were. It was only the runaway slave, overcome by a 
greater terror, flying from a being more awful than any ghost, — 
savage man, — that ventured to go into the church itself, and crouch 
among the broken pews. 

Such is the ruin that befalls a community which subsists upon 
its capital. "We have seen the end of it. Mr. Jefferson, admitted 
to the bar in 1767, saw the beginning-of it, and doubled his estate 
by it in seven years' practice. He was present as a spectator in the 
House of Burgesses in 17G5, when an attempt was made to bolster 
the falling fortunes of leading members by loans of public money. 
Patrick Henry exploded the scheme by an epigram. The speaker 
of the House, who was also the treasurer of the Province, had been 
in the habit for years of lending sums of the public money to dis- 
tressed members and others, becoming himself responsible to the 
government for the repayment. But those planters were doomed 
never to be again in a paying condition. Many of them borrowed, 
few repaid, until his deficit was a hundred and thirty thousand 
pounds. A ring was formed in the Assembly, for the double pur- 
pose of relieving the speaker's estate from this menacing obligation, 
and of enabling him to accommodate others of the ring with further 
loans of public money. A public loan-office was proposed, a sort of 
Bank of Virginia, authorized to lend the public money on good 
security. It was the intention of this ring to make the scheme 
work backward, and include the loans already effected. Mr. Speaker 
Eobinson, in fact, intended to slip his shoulders out from under 
his burden, and leave it saddled upon Virginia. The bill being 
introduced, the borrowing gentlemen supported it by the usual argu- 
ment : Many men in the colony, of large property, had been obliged 
to contract debts, the immediate exaction of which would cause 
their ruin ; but with a little time, and a little seasonable assistance, 
they could pay every thing they owed, with ease. Patrick Henry 
was not the most solvent of men, but he saw the fallacy of this 
argument as applied to the lavish aristocrats of Eastern Virginia. 

" What, sir," he cried, condensing his speech into a sentence, 
" is it proposed, then, to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation 
and extravagance by filling his pocket with money ? " 

There was an end of the scheme of a loan-office. That rending 
sentence "penetrated the understandings of Western yeomen, tho 
solvent class of Virginia ; and they were too numerous for the insol- 



LAWYERS IX OLD VIRGINIA. 81 

vent aristocrats to carry a measure against them. The speaker 
died next year : the deficit could no longer be concealed ; the real 
object of the scheme became apparent ; and the speaker's estate 
had to make good the loss. 

All this sank deeply into the mind of the young man who stood 
listening to the debate at the door of the chamber. That epigram 
of his guest stuck in his rpemory, and remained fixed there while 
Memory held her seat. In scenes widely different from these, at a 
time many years distant, this debate, and the impressive commentary 
upon it disclosed by the speaker's death, may have influenced him 
too much, may have made him too distrustful of institutions which 
enable men of business to apply the superabundance of. next month 
to the insufiiciency of this. 

For the present behold him a bus,y, thriving young lawyer, in the 
midst of the general embai-rassment of the great planters. Sixty- ^.. 
eight cases before the chief court of the Province the first year of 
his practice ; the second 3- ear, one hundred and fifteen ; the third, one 
hundred and ninety-eight ; the fourth, one hundred and twenty-one ; 
the fifth, one hundred and thirty-seven ; the sixth, one hundred 
and fifty-four ; the seventh, one hundred and twenty-seven ; the 
eighth, — which was 1774, — only twenty-nine, for by that time 
Virginia had other work for him. This account, which Mr. Randall 
copied from Jefferson's own books, shows a falling off from the year 
1769. But it was a falling off only from his practice in that one 
court. As the new party lines were formed, and party feeling waxed 
hot, he lost some practice in the General Court, but more than made 
up for the loss by an increase of office business and county-court '^ 
cases. In 1771 he was engaged in a hundred and thirty-seven causes 
before the General Court ; but the whole number of his cases that 
year was four hundred and thirty, since tJie politics that may have 
repelled the tobacco lords of Lower Virginia attracted clients in the 
mountain counties. To the income of four hundred pounds a year, 
derived from his farm, a professional revenue was now added that 
averaged more than five hundred pounds a year ; which made him, 
with his excellent habits, a prosperous 3X)ung gentleman indeed, able 
to add a few hundred acres to his estate from time to time, until his 
home farm of nineteen hundred acres had become, in 1774, a number ^ 
of farms and tracts, five thousand acres in all, and "all»paid for." 
There was nothing in which a thriving Virginian of that day could 
6 



82 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

invest his surplus income except land and slaves. Every one had 
the mania for possessing vast tracts of land, hoping one day to have 
negroes enough to clear and work them. Jefferson, however, appears 
never to have bought slaves as an investment. ■ The thirty slaves 
inherited from his father in 1757 had become but fifty-four in 1774 ; 
anclliis further increase in this kind of property came to him by other 
ways than purchase. 

It is not clear to us what he could have done with his stores of 
legal knowledge, practising before such courts as they had then in 
Virginia. The General Court, of which we read so much, what was 
it ? It was not a bench of learned judges, raised, from the bar- by 
their superior ability -and judicial cast ot mind. It was composed of 
the governor and a quorum (five) of the Council ; the Council being 
a dozen or so of the great planters, appointed by the king, and 
selected, as we are told, for their " wealtli, station, and loyalty." 
This council was a little House of Lords to the Province; and, 
like tlie British House of Lords, it was the Supreme Court 
as well, without a learned chancellor on the woolsack. Governor 
Fauquier, one would think, was better fitted to decide a card-table 
dispute, a point of drawing-room etiquette, or the scanning of aline 
in Horace, than knotty questions of law ; but he was the legal head of 
this court as long as he filled the place of go.vernor. Nor is it to be 
supposed that the wealthy planters of the Council had either inclina- 
tion or ability to make up judgments from the reasoning of the 
Wythes and the Jeffersons that conducted causes in their hearing. 
But the English have had ways of neutralizing the errors of their 
system. They know how, among a crowd of pleasure-loving, un- 
learned peers, to get a few "law lords ; " and how, into a committee 
or a commission of five or seven illustrious incapables, to insert one 
real person, who is appointed for the purpose of doing the work ! So, 
in Virginia, there aj)pears to have usually been in the body of 
councillors one learned and able man, who performed the duty 
of listening, weighing, and deciding. 

Jefferson had most of the requisites of a great lawyer: industry, 
so quiet, methodical, and sustained, that it amounted to a gift ; learn- 
ing, multifarious and exact ; skill and rapidity in handling books ; 
the instinct of research, that leads him who has it to the fact lie 
wants, as surely as the hound scents the game ; a serenity of tem- 
per, which neither the inaptitude of witnesses nor the badgering of 



LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 83 

counsel could ever disturb ; a habit of getting every thing upon paper 
in such a way that all his stores of knowledge could be marshalled 
and brought into action ; a ready sympathy with a client's mind ; an 
intuitive sense of what is due to the opinions, prejudices, and errors 
of others ; a knowledge of the few avenues by which alone unwel- 
come truth can find access to a human mind ; and the power to state 
a case with the clearness and brevity that often make argument 
superfluous. And surely it ought to be reckoned among the quali- 
fications of a lawyer — a trained servant of justice — that he is him- 
self just, and a lover of whatever is right, fair, and equal between a 
man and his brother. A grandson of Mr. Jefferson once asked an 
old man, who, in his youth, had often heard him plead causes, how 
he ranked as a speaker. " Well," said the old man, "it is hard to 
tell, because he always took the right side." * 

He was no orator. He knew too much, and ^vas too much, to be 
eloquent. He once defined a lawyer as a person whose trade it is to 
contest every thing, concede nothing, and talk by the hour. He 
could not talk by the hour. Besides the mental impediment, there 
was a physical impediment to his addressing a large company. If he 
spoke in a tone much above that of conversation, his voice soon 
became husky and inarticulate. But Madison, to whom we owe the 
preservation of this fact, used also to say, that, when he was a student, 
be heard his friend Jefferson plead a cause before a court, and he 
acquitted himself well, speaking with fluency as well as force. He 
could not have been wanting in such speech as was' oftenest required 
before a jury, because we find his practice always increasing in the 
county courts. If he had lived in these times, Patrick Henry and 
himself would have formed a law partnership perhaps; Jefferson 
getting up the cases, and Henry pleading such as gave scope and 
opportunity to his magnificent talent. I It takes two men to make a 
man. .What a power would have been wielded by a firm, one mem- 
ber of which was possessed of an unequalled gift of uttering the 
truth which the other was singularly gifted to investigate ! The two 
talents have never been possessed in an eminent degree by one 
individual. 

This young lawyer loved his work, and took an interest in it, apart 
from the exigencies of the moment. He was one of the first of his 

* Domestic Life of Tliomas Jefferson, p. 40. 



84 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOiT. 

countrymen to form historical collections, — a taste since developed 
into mania. As Virginia was latp in becoming familiar with the 
printing-press, the early laws had been supplied to the counties in 
manuscript at public expense, and without any adequate provision for 
their preservation. He found extreme difficulty in procuring copies 
of some of them ; some appeared to have perished ; others existed 
in one copy so rotten with age that a leaf would fall into powder on 
being touched. " I set myself, therefore, to work," he says, "tocol- 
lect all which were then existing, in order that when the day should 
come in which the public should advert to the magnitude of their 
loss in these precious monuments of our property and our history, a 
part of their regret might be spared by information that a portion 
had been saved from the wreck, which is worthy of their attention 
and preservation. In searching after these remains, I spared neither 
time, trouble, nor expense." The more ancient manuscripts he pre- 
served in oiled silk, some of them being so far gone, that, having been 
laid open for copying, they could never be gathered up again, but 
perished of the operation. Others he had bound into volumes. If 
the reader will turn over the volumes of Hening's " Statutes at 
Large," a publication suggested by Jefferson, and the most impor- 
tant work relating t(j the early history of Virginia which now exists, 
he will discover that a very large number of the most curious docu- 
ments and earliest laws are credited by the editor to Mr. Jefferson's 
collection. 



CHAPTER XII. 

A MEMBER OE THE VIEGIJTIA LEGISLATURE. 

It belonged to his position in Albemarle to represent that county 
in the House of Burgesses ; but, in imitation of the British Parlia- 
ment, the little parliament of Virginia usually lasted seven years, 
and consequently there had been no general election, since he came of 
age. In 1767 Governor Fauquier died, aged sixty-five, and there was 
an interregnum of a year, during which the duties of governor 
devolved on the President of the Council, John Blair; but there was 
no pause in the course of political events. The king held to his 
purpose of raising a revenue in the colonies ; and an obliging min- 
istry having, as they supposed, learned wisdom from the failure of 
their predecessors to enforce the Stamp Act, endeavored next " to 
raise a revenue from the colonies without giving them any offence^ 
These words of Charles Townsend give us the key to the policy of 
the ministry. The colonies were to be flattered and conciliated. 
They had objected to an internal tax ; very well, they should be 
accommodated with external duties collected at the custom-houses, 
trifling duties on glass, tea, paper, and painters' materials. Any 
thing to oblige colonies so loyal, so willing to assist a gracious young 
king. In the spring of 1768 an express came riding into Wil- 
liamsburg, bearing a despatch from Massachusetts to the House of 
Burgesses, announcing the firm resolve of Massachusetts to resist 
these duties by all constitutional means, and asking the concurrence 
and co-operation of Virginia. The messenger, having delivered his 
despatch, rode southward to deliver copies of the same to the Caro- 
linas and Georgia. 

The Virginians, in the absence of a royal governor, could give full 
play to their opposition ; for John Blair was in accord with the 
popular feeling. Another remonstrance was addressed to Great 

85 



86 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIST. 

Britain, asserting strongly, but with dignity and moderation, the old 
principle, "ISTo power on earth has a right to impose taxes on the 
people, or take the smallest portion of their pi'operty, without their 
consent given b}' their representatives." It is remarkable with what 
clearness this truth was perceived by every creature in America who 
had capacity to perceive any truth. Nearly everybody seems, at 
first, to have understood that this principle was, as our loyal Vir- 
ginians said on this occasion, "the chief pillar of the Constitution," 
without which "no man could be said to have the least shadow of 
liberty ; " since no man could be truly said to possess any thing, if 
other men could lawfully take any portion of it. 

A royal governor of amplest 'dignity was coming over the sea. 
In accordance with the new imbecility of flattering the colonies, it 
was determined, that, in future, tlie governor-in-chief should reside 
in Virginia, instead of governing his Province by a lieutenant. Vir- 
ginia was thrilled by the announcement that a personage of no less 
note than the Right Honorable Norborue Baron de Botetourt was 
coming in person to govern them. In October, 1768, he arrived 
with a prodigious train of servants and' baggage, and a gorgeous 
state-coach, the gift of the king, and milk-white steeds to draw it, 
which some historians say were eight in number, others six. Vir- 
ginia, no less loyal to the king than to Magna Charta, rose to the 
occasion, and gave the Right Honorable Norborne Baron de Botetourt 
a reception worthy of his name. One relic of this ceremonial is an 
" Ode," published in the " Virginia Gazette," which swells with the 
importance of the occasion. If this " Ode " was actually sung in the 
presence of Lord Botetourt, he must have been hard put to it to 
preserve the gravity of his countenance. 

Eecitative. 

Virginia, see, thy Governor appears ! 

The peaceful olive on his brow lie wears ! 

Sound the shrill trumpets, beat the rattling drums ; 

From Great Britannia's isle his Lordship comes. 

Bid Echo from the waving woods arise. 

And joyful acclamations reach the skies ; 

Let the loud organs join their tuneful roar, 

And bellowing cannons rend the pebbled shore; 

Bid smooth James River catch the cheerful sound, 

And roll it to Virginia's utmost bound ; 

While Rappahannock and York's gliding stream 

Swift shall convey the sweetly pleasing theme 



A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 81 

To distant plains, whei'e pond'rous mountains rise, 
Whose cloud-capped ver;^es meet the bending skies; 
The Lordly Prize the Atlantic waves resign, 
And now, Virginia, now the Blessing's thine: 
His listening ears will to your burst attend. 
And be your guardian, governor, and friend. 

Air. 

He comes : His Excellency comes. 

To cheer Virginian plains ! 
Fill your brisk bowls, ye loyal sons, 

And sing your loftiest strains. 
Be this your glory, this your boast, 
Lord Botetourt's the favorite toast : 

Triumphant wreaths intwine; 
Fill full your bumpers swiftly round, 
And make your spacious rooms resound 

With music, joy, and wine. 

Recitative. 

Search every garden, strip the shrubby bowers, 
And strew his path with sweet autumnal flowers ! 
Ye virgins, haste, prepare the fragrant rose. 
And with triumphant laurels crown his brows. 

Ddet. 

(Enter virgins with flowers, laurels, etc.) 
See, we've stript each flowery bed ; 
Here's laurels for his Lordly Head ; 
And while Virginia is his care. 
May he protect the virtuous fair ! 

Air. 

Long may he live in health and peace, 

And every hour his joys increase! 

To this let every swain and lass 

Take the sparkling, flowing glass ; 

Then join the sprightly dance, and sing, 

Health to our Governor, and God save the King. 

Virgins. 

Health to our Governor. 

Bass Solo. 

Health to our Governor. 

Chords. * 

Health to our Governor, and GOD save the KING ! 



88 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESOX. 

It is difficult to conceive of such an outburst as this coming from 
the community that sent forth a series of sucli manly and able 
papers on the rights of men and citizens ; but they were all still 
under the illusion of royalty. Jefferson himself, perhaps, in 1768, 
could have accompanied this performance on his violin without 
violent grimaces. 

To business. As when a new king comes to the throne, Parlia- 
ment is dissolved, so, on the arrival of a new governor, the House 
of Burgesses was 'dismissed, and a general election ordered. Thomas 
Jefferson announced himself a candidate for the county of Albemarle ; 
and, during the winter of 17G8-C9, he canvassed his county for votes, 
— visiting each voter, asking him for his vote and influence, getting 
his promise if possible, keeping open house and full punch-bowl as 
long as the canvass lasted. Every voter was rightly compelled to 
vote at every election, under penalty of a hundred pounds of 
tobacco. During the three election days the candidates supplied 
unlimited punch and lunch, attended personally at the polls, and 
made a low bow as often as they heard themselves voted for. No 
candidate was so strong that he could omit the treating or the can- 
vassing. James Madison was the first who tried it in Virginia, in 
1777 ; and he lost his election by it. The withdrawal of the punch- 
bowl was ascribed to parsimony, and the omission of the canvassing 
to pride. 

Jefferson's election was a matter of course. Nevertheless, he ac- 
cepted the honorable trust with seriousness, and formed a resolution, 
the wisdom of which every j^ear of the existence of free government 
has only the more clearly shown. We owe the record of this reso- 
lution to his own pen. At a later stage of his public life, a friend 
having invited him to share in some enterprise that promised profit," 
he made this reply : — 

" When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty- 
four years ago), I came to a resolution never to engage, while in 
public ofBce, in any kind of enterprise for the improvement of my 
fortune, nor to wear any other character than that of a farmer. I 
have never departed from it in a single instance ; and I have, in 
multiplied instances, found mj^self hajipy in being able to decide and 
to act as a public servant, clear of all interest, in the multiform ques- 
tions that have arisen, wherein I have seen others embarrassed and 



A MEMBER OF THE VIBGINIA LEGISLATURE. 89 

biased by having got tbemselves in a more interested situation. 
Thus I have thought myself richer in contentment than I should 
have been with any increase of fortune. Certainly I should have 
been much wealthier had I remained in that private condition which 
renders it lawful and even laudable to use proper efforts to better it." 

It was in this spirit that he began his public life of forty years. 
At the same time he was very desirous of distinguishing himself. 
He desired most ardently the approval of his countrymen. He 
avowed to Madison, long after, that, in the earlier years of his 
public service, " the esteem of the world was, perhaps, of higher 
value in his eyes than every thing in it." 

The assembly convened on the 31th of May, 1769, nearly a hun- 
dred members in attendance, Colonel George Washington among 
them. It must have been a great day for the children and negroes 
of Williamsburg ; for Lord Botetourt was to ride, for the first time, 
in his splendid state-coach, a king's gift, from the palace to the 
Capitol, to open the Provincial Parliament in person. Posterity 
will perhaps never know with certainty whether his lordship was 
drawn on this occasion by six milk-white steeds, or by eight, be- 
cause historians differ on the point; and Mr. Burk says eight on 
one page of his history, and six on another. The yeoman of the 
western counties, and indeed tlie members generally, though much 
conciliated by the frank and friendly manner of the governor, eyed 
his grand coach with disfavor, regarding it as a college youth 
might the present of a large humming-top sent by a relative on 
the other side of the globe. He is past humming-tops. "Poor 
old uncle," says the lad, as he feels his nascent mustache, " he still 
thinks of me as the boy I wasJ^ We can well believe, however, 
that as the milk-white steeds, covered with the showy trq,ppings of 
the time, slowly drew the gaudy coach between lines of faces, 
black and white, the spectacle was greeted with acclamations. 
Upon reaching the Capitol, at the other end of the avenue, the 
governor alighted, and ascended, with stately steps and slow, to the 
Council Chamber, the Council being the Senate, or House of Lords 
of Virginia. 

How amusingly formal the opening of the little parliament ! 
Young Jefferson miglit well be surprised at the free-and-easy ways 
of the Maryland Legislature j for at Williamsburg all the etiquette 



90 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFERSON". 

of legislation was observed with rigor. Imagine the members, new 
and old, strolling into the chamber towards ten in the morning; 
Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, perhaps, going up together 
from their lodging-house. When the bell rings, Jefferson need not 
now withdraw to the lobby door. Two members of the Council 
are in attendance, at the governor's command, to administer the 
oath to the burgesses, standing and uncovered : — 

"You and every one of you shall swear upon the Holy Evange- 
lists, and in the sight of God, to deliver your opinion faithfully, 
justly, and honestly, according to your best understanding and con- 
science, for the general good and prosperity of this country, and 
every particular member thereof; and to do your iitmost endeavor 
to prosecute that, without mingling with it any particular interest 
of any person or persons whatever. So .help you God and the con- 
tents of this book." 

The members having taken their seats, and resumed their hats, 
the clerk of the General Assembly appears, and pronounces these 
words : " Gentlemen, the governor commands this House to attend 
His Excellency immediately in the Council Chamber." The bur- 
gesses obey this command ; and being gathered about His Excellency, 
seated on his viceregal throne, are thus addressed by him : " Gen- 
tlemen of the House of Burgesses, you must return to your House, 
and immediately proceed to the choice of a speaker." This com- 
mand also the House obeys; and when they are once more in their 
seats, and silent, the clerk being at his desk, a member rises and 
says, " Mr. Clerk." The clerk then stands up, points to the mem- 
ber without speaking, and sits down again. The member speaks : 
"I move that Peyton Randolph, Esq., take the chair of this 
House as speaker, which office he has before filled with such dis- 
tinguished abilities, steadiness, and impartiality, as have given 
entire satisfaction to the public." Mr. Randolph is unanimously 
elected. Two members attend him, one on each side, from his seat 
to the uppermost step of the platform, which having ascended, and 
being left there alone, he turns and addresses the House, thanking 
them for their unanimous vote, and asking their indulgence for the 
future. As soon as he has taken his seat in the speaker's chair, the 
mace, which until that moment has lain under the table, is placed 
ux)on it. 



A MEMBER OP THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 91 

Is the House now ready to transact business ? By no means. 
It is next ordered that two members bear a message to the gover- 
nor, informing him, that, in obedience to his commands, they have 
elected a speaker, and desire to know His Excellency's pleasure 
when they shall wait upon him to present their speaker to him. To 
this message the governor replies that he will send an answer by a 
messenger of his own. Accordingly the clerk of the General 
Assembly soon re-appears in the House, and delivers the governor's 
answer: "The governor commands this House to attend His Excel- 
lency immediately in the Council Chamber.''" Once more the bur- 
gesses march to the apartment, but this time with a speaker at their 
head ; and, when the speaker has been presented to the governor, 
His Excellency is pleased to say that he approves their choice. 
Then the speaker, on behalf of the House, lays claim to all its 
ancient rights and privileges, — freedom of sj^eech, untrammelled 
debate, exemption from arrest, and protection of their estates from 
attachment. Finally he asks the governor not to impute to the 
Hoiise any errors their speaker may commit. The governor 
answers that he shall take care to defend them in all their rights 
and privileges. Then the governor reads his speech, conceived on 
the plan of a king's speech, addressing first the Council and the 
Burgesses, then the Burgesses alone, and finally both Houses once 
more. 

The speech being finished, the speaker asks a copy for the guid- 
ance of the House of Burgesses ; which is furnished him, and the 
burgesses return to Iheir own chamber. The speaker ascends to his 
chair, whence he makes a formal report of what they had just wit- 
nessed. He informs them that the governor had made a speech 
to the Council and Burgesses, of which, '' to prevent mistakes," he 
had obtained a copy ; which he proceeds to read to the House. 
Not till this formality is over is the House ready to perform an act 
of its own. /^ 

To such a point of decorum had the House be^i^brought 
since the time, 1664, when it was necessary to impose a fine .of 
twenty pounds of tobacco upon ** every member that shall pipe it" 
after the roll had begun to be called, unless, in an interval of 
business, he obtained " public license from the major part of the 
house." The same code was stringent with regard to all breaches 
of decorum. Any member adjudged by the majority to be " dis- 



92 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

guised with drink " was fined, for the first offence, one hundred 
pounds of tobacco ; for tlie second, three liuudred pounds ; and, for 
the third, a thousand. To interrupt a member cost the offender a 
thousand pounds of tobacco ; and, to speak of a member with disre- 
spect, five hundred. As the pay of members was a hundred and 
fifty pounds of tobacco per day, with a further allowance for 
travelling expenses and servants, these fines were severe ; and 
doubtless they had their share in making this Virginian parlia- 
ment the dignified and decorous body we know it to have been. 
Its influence lives to-day in every legislative hall in the country, 
transmitted by Jefferson's Manual. 

One of its kindly and courteous customs brought to the new mem- 
ber from Albemarle a cutting mortification on the first day of the 
session. It was usual to assign some formal duty to young members 
by way of introducing them to public business, and giving them an 
opportunity to air their talents. As soon as the speaker had fin- 
ished reading the governor's speech, it was in order to appoint a 
committee to make the draught of a reply ; and, to assist this com- 
mittee, the House was accustomed to pass resolutions, the substance 
of which was to be incorporated in the draught. Jefferson, in com- 
pliance with the request of Mr. Pendleton, a leading member, wrote 
these resolutions, which the House accepted ; and he was named 
one of the committee to prepare the address. His elders, Mr. Pen- 
dleton and Mr. Nicholas, assigned him this duty also. He wrote 
the draught on the too obvious plan of sticking close to the resolu- 
tions, employing much of their very language. Upon reading his 
draught to the committee, — pluming himself, as he confesses, upon 
the neatness and finish of his performance, — the elder members 
were. totally dissatisfied with it. It would not do at all. The resolu- 
tions, they said, should be regarded only as hints, to be amplified into 
a flowing and original discourse. Jefferson's draught was set aside ; 
and Mr. Nicholas, his chief critic, the head of the bar of Virginia, 
was ajppointed to produce a more suitable composition. The old 
hand could not be at a loss in expanding and rewording the compact 
resolutions of the tyro ; and his draught was accepted both by the 
committee and 'the House. ''Being a j'^oung man," wrote Jefferson 
long after, "as well as a young member, it made on me an impres- 
sion proportioned to the sensibility of that time of life." Thus the 
man who was destined to gain by his pen the parliamentary distinc- 



A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 93 

tion usually won only by the tongue, began bis career, as so many 
illustrious orators have done, by a failure. 

These lofty civilities between the governor and the Legislature 
consumed, as it seems, two days. What next ? Lord Botetourt in 
his speech had made no particular suggestions; and, in the minds 
of members, there was but one thought, — to resist the lawless taxa- 
tion of the colonies by Parliament, and the reckless outrage of 
sending persons accused of treason to be tried on the other side of 
the ocean. The spirited behavior of Massachusetts in inviting the 
concurrence of the other colonies in constitutional opposition to 
these measures had been severely commented upon in England ; and 
this was a new cause of irritation. The milk-white steeds, too, and 
the gaudy coach, had increased suspicion in some minds. Indeed, 
at just this stage of the controversy, there was a near approach to 
unanimity of feeling along the whole line of the Thirteen Colonies, 
and in none of them a nearer than in loyal Virginia. And they 
were all equally mistaken in attributing the false policy of thq 
mother country to Parliament and ministers, instead of the king 
and his Scotch tutors. ^ 

On the third day were introduced the Four Resolutions, which a 
precipitate governor was to stamp with the seal of his reprobation, 
and so send them ringing round the world : 1. No taxation without > 
representation ; 2. The colonies may concur and co-operate in seek- \ 
ing redress of grievances ; 3. Sending accused persons away from 
their country for trial is (an inexpressible complexity of wrong ;[)'0 
4. We will send an address on these topics to the " father of all his 
people," beseeching his " royal interposition." The resolutions being 
passed almost unanimously, the speaker was ordered to send a copy 
of the same to every legislative Assembly ''on this continent." 
After such a day's work the House adjourned. That for your 
milk-white steeds ! The next day the address to the king was 
reported, revised, agreed to, and ordered to be forwarded to the king's 
most excellent Majesty, through the colony's London agent, and 
afterwards published in the English newspapers. On the day fol- 
lowing, at noon. Lord Botetourt's secretary entered the chamber. 
He pronounced the formula: "The governor commands this House 
to attend His Excellency in the Council Chamber." The members 
tramped to the other end of the building, and ranged themselves 
expectant about the throne. No one, I think (though tradition has 



94 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

it otherwise), anticipated the governor's extreme course ; and all 
appear to have been astounded to hear the "ominous and alarming 
words," as Burk styles them, which fell from his lips: — 

"Mr. S2:)eaker and Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses : I have 
heard of 3'our resolves, and augur ill of their effects. You have 
made it my duty to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly." 

Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were by these words changed, 
in an instant, from a legislative assembly into a hundred and eight 
private gentlemen. Such was the law of the British Empire. The 
new member from Albemarle, after all his canvassing and treating, 
enjoyed the honor of representing his native county five days, dur- 
ing one of which he had received a snub. But now the whole 
House, Virginia, Magna Charta, the rights and dignity of man, had 
been mocked and made of no account. 

What an afternoon and evening Williamsburg must have experi- 
enced after that abrupt dismissal of the House ! It is strange, that, 
among so many writers, no one should have left a more minute record 
than has yet come to light. How did Colonel Washington take it ? 
By birth and feeling he was a yeoman ; and he had narrowly 
escaped going to sea before the mast, to work his way, if he could, 
up to the command of a merchant-ship. But his brilliant gallantry 
in the field, and a rich widow's hand and fortune, had placed him 
among the aristocrats. No man can quite avoid the reigning foible 
of his class and time. Washington's sense of justice, however, was 
sure and keen ; and he had been, from the first rumor of the Stamp 
Act, on the right side of this great controversy. He was no milk- 
sop. There was a fund — a whole volcano — of suppressed fire in 
him; and being still a young man, all unschooled to the prudential 
reticence of the statesman, he doubtless favored the company with 
his sentiments. I suppose he dined that afternoon at the old Ra- 
leiglj tavern, with many other members ; and, amid the roar of talk, 
his voice was occasionally heard, uttering those hearty exclamations 
with which the Virginians of that day used to relieve their minds. 
We can fancy Patrick Henry, too, surrounded as he must have been 
at such a time, holding high discourse in the evening on the piazza; 
and all Williamsburg standing in groups, discussing the great event 
of the day, and the greater events expected to-morrow. Jeiferson 



A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 95 

probably, and other writing members, were closeted somewhere in the 
town, preparing for the next day's work. A hundred gentlemen 
may not be a House of Burgesses, but they can hold a meeting; 
and a meeting they mean to hold to-morrow in the Apollo, the 
great room of the Raleigh tavern, where so manj^ of them have 
danced the minuet. 

They met accordingly. We only know what the}^ did on the 
occasion, not how they did it. Following the example set by Massa- 
chusetts the year before, they agreed to recommend their constituents 
to try and starve a little good sense into the minds of British manu- 
facturers and merchants. It was America that gave Great Britain 
the deadly w^ealth — ill-distributed wealth is alwajus deadly — -with 
which she is now struggling for life. These Virginians, acting upon 
Franklin's hint and Massachusetts' example, agreed : 1. To be a 
great deal more saving and industrious than they ever were before ; 
2. Never again, as long as time should endure, to buy an article 
taxed by Parliament for the sake of raising a revenue in America, 
excepting alone low qualities of paper, without which the business 
of life could not go on ; 3. Never, until the repeal of the recent act, 
to import any article from Britain, or in British ships, which it was 
possible to do without; 4. They would save all tlieir lambs for 
wool. And, lest any weak brother should choose to misunderstand 
the terms of the compact, they enumerated the forbidden articles, 
— an interesting catalogue, because it shows how dependent Vir- 
ginia then was upon Europe for every thing except some of the 
coarser staples of food and raiment. The list was : — v,.,J 

Spirits, wine, cider, perry, beer, ale, malt, barley, pease, beef, ( 
pork, fish, butter, cheese, tallow, candles, oil, fruit, sugar, pickles, 
confectionery, pewter, hoes, axes, watches, clocks, tables, chairs, 
looking-glasses, carriages, joiners' and cabinet W'ork, upholstery, 
trinkets, jewelry, plate and gold, silver-ware, ribbons, millinery, lace, 
India goods except spices, silks except sewing-silk, cambric, lawn, 
muslin, gauze except bolting-cloths, calico, cotton or linen stuffs 
above 2s. per yard, woollens above Is. Qd., broadcloths above Ss., 
narrow cloths above Ss., hats, stockings, shoes, boots, saddles, and all 
leather-work. 

Eighty-eight members of the House of Burgesses signed this 
agreement. As it was seldom that more than ninety-five members 
were in attendance on the same day, this was a near approach to 



96 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

unanimity. Virginia accepted the compact made by her representa- 
tives. Every man who signed the agreement was re-elected. Ev- 
ery man who refused lost his election. 

The respectful tone of the document, the perfect decency of the 
proceedings in the Apollo, the dignified character of the men who 
led the movement, made the deepest impression upon the mind of 
Lord Botecourt. He had been told in London — I need not say 
what. We all know how England has misinterpreted America 
always. America has generally loved that step-mother too much ; 
England has never loved America at all. What Lord Botetourt 
found in Virginia, w^ know ; and he had understanding enough to 
discern the trut]i. He wrote home to the ministry that these 
Virginians were not rebellious, not factious, not indifterent to the 
needs of the empire, but loyal subjects, contending for the birth- 
right of Englishmen, with intelligence and dignity. There was 
vacillation in the counsels of the king, and the party opposed to the 
taxation of the colonies gained a brief ascendency. 

Lord Botecourt, therefore, before many months had gone by, had 
the i^leasure of summoning the Assembly ; and again there passed 
between them those elaborate formalities described above. When, 
at length, he had reached the point of delivering his speech, what 
a joyful announcement it was his privilege to make ! 

"I have been assured by the Earl of Hillsborough, that His 
Majesty's present administration have at no time entertained a 
design to propose to Parliament to lay any further taxes upon Ameri- 
ca for the purpose of raising a revenue, and that it is their intention 
to propose to the next session of Parliment, to take off the duties 
upon glass, paper, and colors, upon consideration of such duties hav- 
ing been laid contrary to the true principles of commerce." 

These words thrilled every heart. Joy glistened in every eye. 
No one seems to have noticed the omission of the word tea from the 
list. The governor, now in the fullest sympathy with the people of 
his Province, could not be content without adding some assurances 
for the remoter future ; and he proceeded to utter words, that, in all 
probability, cost him his life. He was a gentleman of the nicest 
sense of honor, in whose mind a promise of his own unfulfilled 
might rankle mortally. A ministry, he observed, is not immortal : 



A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 97 

what then of their successors ? Upon this point, he said, he could 
give only a personal assurance. 

" It is my firm opinion, that the plan I have stated to you will 
certainly take place, and that it will never he dejjarted from ; and so 
determined am I ever to ahide hy it, that I will be content to be 
declared infamous, if I do not, to the last hour of my life, at all 
times, in all places, and upon all occasions, exert every power with 
which I am or shall be legally invested, in order to obtain and 
maintain for the continent of America that satisfaction which I 
have been authorized to promise this day, by the confidential ser- 
vants of our gracious sovereign, who, to my certain knowledge, rates 
his honor so high, that he would rather part with his crown than 
preserve it by deceit." 

Almost while he uttered these words, which seemed to pledge the 
king, the ministry, and himself. Lord Korth came into power, and 
renewed the strife. Lord Botetourt with indignation demanded his 
recall ; but, before he obtained it, he died, as is supposed, of morti- 
fication at his inability to make good his emphatic assurances. 
Virginia did justice to his character, and placed his statue in the 
public square of Williamsburg. 

For the present, however, all minds were content, and the parlia- 
ment of Virginia proceeded with alacrity to business. The member 
from Albemarle received, during his second session, a rebuff more 
decided and more public than when his draught was so summarily 
set aside in his first. 

What an absurd creature is man ! This sanguine young burgess, 
now that all danger seemed past of his white countrymen being, as 
they termed it, "reduced to slavery," thouglit it a good time to 
endeavor to mitigate the oppression of his black countrymen, who 
were reduced to slavery already. He soon had the hornets about 
his ears. At that time, no man could free his slaves without sending 
them out of Virginia. Jefferson desired the repeal of this law. He 
wished to throw around the slaves what he calls "certain moderate 
extensions of the protection of the laws." With the proper mod- 
esty of a young member, he called the attention of Colonel Bland 
to this subject, secured his co-operation, and induced him to intro- 
duce the bill. " I seconded his motion," records Jefferson, " and, as 



98 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

a younger member, was more spared in the debate ; but he was 
denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the 
greatest indecorum"! And this, too, although Colonel Bland was 
" one of the oldest, ablest, and most-respected members " ! Jefferson 
attributes this conduct to the habitual subservience of members to 
the mother country. " During the regal government," he says, 
"nothing liberal could expect success." Under no government has 
an assembly of slaveholders ever been otherwise than restive under 
attempts to limit their power over their slaves. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

HIS MARRIAGE. 

This year, 1769, so fruitful of public events, Avas a busy and 
interesting one to the member from Albemarle in his private capa- 
city. He was now in the fullest tide of practice at the bar, — one 
hundred and ninety-eight cases before the General Court, the great- 
est number he ever reached in a year. Already he had chosen 
Monticello as the site of his future home. He had had men chop- 
ping and clearing on the summit for some time ; and, in the spring 
of this year, he had an orchard planted on one of its slopes. Be- 
tween the two sessions he superintended the construction of a brick 
wing of the coming mansion, one pretty large room with a chamber 
or two over it, under the roof. The General Court sat in April. 
During December and January he was preparing for the court, 
making briefs, taking notes, collecting precedents ; getting every 
thing, according to his custom, upon paper, and then dismissing it 
from his mind. On the 1st of February, 1770, his mother and 
himself went from home to visit a neighbor. While they were at 
the neighbor's house, a slave came to them, breathless, to say that 
their house and all its contents were burned. After the man had 
finished his account of the catastrophe, the master asked, "But 
were none of my books saved ? " A grin of exultation overspread 
the sable countenance. " No, master," said the negro, '' but we 
saved the fiddle ! " 

Two hundred pounds' worth of books gone, besides all his law- 
papers, and notes of cases coming on in April for trial ! Nothing 
saved but a few old volumes of his father's library, and some un- 
important manuscript books of his own. His mother and the chil- 
dren found temporary shelter in the house of an overseer ; and he 
repaired to his unfinished nest on the mountain-top, where he vainly 

99 



100 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

strove to recoustruct his cases for the coming term. It was an iron 
rule of that primitive court, never to grant an adjournment of a 
case to another term. How he made it up with his clients and the 
coA-t, no one has told us. 

That house which he was constructing on Monticello was strangely 
in his thoughts during the next year or two. When he was far 
away from home he brooded over it ; and he used to solace the tedium 
of country inns by elaborately recording dreams of its coming fit- 
ness and beauty. It was his resolve that there should be one 
mansion in Virginia, for the design of which the genius of archi- 
tecture should at least be invoked. He meant that there should 
be one home in Virginia worthy the occupation of perfectly civilized 
beings'; in which art, taste, and utility should unite to produce an 
admirable result. What a piece of work it was to place such an 
abode on the summit of his little mountain, with no architect but 
himself, few workmen but slaves, no landscape-gardeiier witliin three 
thousand miles, no models to copy, no grounds to imitate, no tincture 
of high gardening in the Province. The bricks had to be made, the 
trees felled, the timber hewn, the nails wrought, the vehicles con- 
structed, the laborers trained, on the scene of operations, No fine 
commodities could be bought nearer than Williamsburg, a hundred 
and fifty miles distant, nor many nearer than Europe. He had to send 
for even his sashes to London, where one lot was detained a month 
to let the putty harden ! Nothing but the coarsest, roughest work 
could go on in his absence ; and often the business stood still for 
weeks, for months, for years, while he was in public service. But 
he kept on with an indomitable pertinacity for a quarter of a cen- 
tury, at the expiration of which he had the most agreeable and 
refined abode in Virginia, filled with objects of taste and the means 
of instruction, and surrounded by beautiful lawns, groves, and gar- 
dens. 

At present all this existed only in his thoughts. He used to 
write, in one of his numerous blank-books, minute plans for various 
parts of the grounds, still rough with the primeval stumps. A 
most unlawyer-like tone breathes through these written musings. 
What spell was upon him, when, in dreaming of a future cemetery, 
he could begin his entry with a sentence like this ? " Choose out 
for a burial-place some unfrequented vale in the park, where is ' no 
sound to break the stillness but a brook, that, bubbling, winds among 



HIS MAEEIAGE. 101 

the weeds ; no mark of any human shape that had been there, 
unless the skeleton of some poor wretch who sought that place out 
to despair and die in.' " The rest of the description is in a similar 
taste. The park, in general, was to be a grassy expanse, ad-q^ned 
with every fragrant shrub, with trees and groves, and it was to be 
the haunt of every animal and bird pleasing to man. " Court them 
to it by laying food for them in proper places. Procure a buck-elk 
to be, as it were, monarch of the wood ; but keep him shy, that his 
appearance may not lose its effect by too much familiarity. A 
buffalo might be confined also. Inscriptions in various places, on 
the bark of trees or metal plates, suited to the character and expres- 
sion of the particular spot." Whence these broodings over the 
mountain nest that was forming under his eye ? Could it be love ? 
Seven years before, he had solemnly assured John Page, tliat, if 
Belinda would not accept his service, it should never be offered to 
another. 

But the mightiest capacity which this man possessed was the 
capacity to love. In every other quality and grace of human nature 
he has been often equalled, sometimes excelled ; but where has there 
ever been a lover so tender, so warm, so constant, as he ? Love was 
his life. Few men have had so many sources of pleasure, so many 
agreeable tastes and pursuits ; but he knew no satisfying joy, at any 
period of his life, except through his affections. And there is none 
other for any of us. There is only one thing that makes it worthN- 
while to live : it is love. Not the wild passion that plagues us in 
our youth, but the tranquil happiness, the solid peace, to which 
that is but the tumultuous prelude, — the joy of living with people 
whose mere presence rests, cheers, improves, and satisfies us. He 
who achieves that needs no catechism to tell him what is the chief 
end of man. That is the chief end of man. Nothing else is oiy 
any account, except so far as it ministers to that. Jefferson was 
making this beautiful mountain nest for a mate whom he meant to 
ask to come and share it with him. 

Among his associates at the Williamsburg bar was John Wayles, 
a lawyer in great practice, who had an estate near by, upon which 
he lived, called The Forest. He, too, had thriven upon the decline 
of Virginia ; and he had invested his fees in lands and slaves, until, 
in 1771, he had a dozen farms and tracts in various parts of the 
Province, and four hundred slaves. At his home (which was not so 



102 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

far from Williamsburg that a young barrister could not ride to it 
occasionally with a violin under his arm) there lived with him his 
widowed daughter, Martha Skelton, childless,' a beauty, fond of 
music, and twenty-two. We all know how delightfully the piano 
and the violin go together when both are nicely touched. It was 
the same with the spinet and the violin. Jefferson had improved 
in person and in position since he had danced with Belinda in the 
Apollo, seven years before. It was observed of him that he con- 
stantly grew better looking as he advanced in life, — plain in 
youth, good-looking in his prime, handsome as an old man. And 
he had now advanced from the bashful student to the condition 
of a remarkably successful lawyer and member of the Assem- 
bly. The wooing appears to have been long. She was a widow 
in 1768, and there are slight indications of a new love in one 
of Fis letters of 1770 ; but they were not married till New- Year's 
Day, 1772. 

How fixed his habit was of recording every item of expense is 
shown by the page of his pocket-diary for his wedding-day. The 
fees of the two clergymen in attendance, the sums given to musi- 
cians and servants, all are set down in order, quite as usual. On 
one of the early days of January, 1772, the newly married pair 
started from The Forest, where the ceremony had been performed, 
for Monticello, their future abode, more than a hundred miles dis- 
tant, in a two-horse chaise. 

As the day lengthens, the cold strengthens. In Virginia there is 
often no serious winter till after New Year's, when all at once it 
comes rushing down from the north in a tempest of wind and snow. 
There was some snow on the ground when they left the bride's 
home ; and it grew deeper as they went towards the mountains, until 
it was too deep for their vehicle. They were obliged, at last, to 
leave the carriage, and mount the horses. At sunset on the last 
day of their journey, when they were still eight miles from Monti- 
cello, the snow was nearly two feet deep. A friend's house gave 
them rest for a while, but they would plod on, and get home that 
night. They reached the foot of the mountain, ploughed up the 
long ascent, and stood at length, late at night, cold and tired, 
before their door. 

In old Virginia servants seldom lodged in their master's bouse, 
but in cabins of their own, to which they returned after their work 



HIS MAERIAGE. 103 

was done. No light saluted the arriving pair. No voice welcomed 
them. No door opened to receive them. The servants had given 
them up long before, and gone home to bed. Worst of all, the fires 
were out, and the house was cold, dark, and dismal. What a wel- 
come to a bride on a cold night in January ! They burst into the 
house, and flooded it with the warmth and light of their own un- 
quenchable good-humor ! Who could wish a better place for a 
honeymoon than a snug brick cottage, lifted five hundred and 
eighty feet above the world, with half a dozen counties in sight, and 
three feet of snow blocking out all intruders ? What readings of 
Ossian there must have been ! I hope she enjoyed them as well as 
he. For his part, the poems of that ancient bard — if he was 
ancient — were curiously associated in his mind with the tender 
feelings; and now, shut in with his love in his mountain home, he 
grew so enamoured of the poet, that nothing would content him but 
studjnng him in the original Gaelic. 

He wrote to his acquaintance, Charles Macpherson, cousin of the 
translator, that " merely for the pleasure of reading Ossian's works, 
he was desirous to learn the language in which he sung." He begs 
Macpherson to send him from Scotland, not only a grammar, a dic- 
tionary, a catalogue of Gaelic works, and whatever other apparatus 
might be necessary, but copies of all the Ossianic poems in the origi- 
nal Gaelic. If they had been printed, he would have them in print. 
If not, " my petition is, that you would be so good as to use your 
interest with Mr. Macpherson to obtain leave to take a manuscript 
copy of them, and to procure it to be done. I would choose it in a 
fair, round hand, with a good margin, bound in parchments as ele- 
gantly as possible, lettered on the back, and marbled or gilt on the 
edges of the leaves. I would not regard expense in doing this." He 
tells him, that if there are any other Gaelic manuscript poems acces- 
sible, it would at any time give him " the greatest happiness " to 
receive them ; for " the glow of one warm thought is to me worth 
more than nwney." 

Public events prevented the execution of this scheme. It is 
remarkable, that, here in the woods of America, a young man, inspired 
by love, should have hit upon the method, very simple and obvious, 
it is true, which, a hundred years after, has apparently cleared up 
the Ossianic mystery, by showing that Macpherson's Ossian is a 
poor, slurring translation of poems really existing in the Gaelic Ian- 



104 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

guage.* Among a tliousand babblers, it is the man who goes out of 
his way, and looks at the thing with his own eyes, who is likely to 
understand it first. 

Next year the death of his wife's father brought them forty thou- 
sand acres of land and one hundred and thirfc^'^-five slaves. When 
their share of the debts upon Mr. Wayles's estate had been paid, 
the fortunes of the wife and of the husband were about equal. The 
Natural Bridge, eighty miles from Monticello, was upon one of the 
tracts now added to their property. 

The year 1772, which was the first of JeflFerson's married life, I 
think he would have ever after pronounced the happiest of all his 
years. To most of us, perhaps, that first year, or at least some 
small part of it, is the most consciously happy time we ever know. 
It may w^ell be so. Tlie moment when two stand at the altar, a 
wedded pair, is the moment for which all their past moments were 
made, from which all their future moments date. The first months 
are a blissful pause in life's toilsome journey ; for the old cares have 
ended in fruition, and the new cares are as yet nothing but delight. 
The chilly winter of desire is past ; the tempest of the passions 
l^asses soon with well-attempered minds ; 'it is May-time then, the 
bright and sunny seed-time, when no one thinks that .the harvest 
can be other than glorious. Nature begins every thing with a smile. 
The most bountiful harvest is not joyous and serene, like the May 
morning when the wheat is only a greener grass, and the trees have 
nothing for us but blossoms. We see many couples who have been 
harshly dealt with in the struggle for life, — they are sadly battered 
and worn ; and we meet others who have dealt harshly with one an- 
other, whose case is more deplorable. It is an affecting thought, that 
they, to'o, must once have looked hopefully upon life, must once have 
been pleasing in one another's eyes, must once have had their Monti- 
cello to go home to, and to make lovely by their touch, — if it were 
only two tenement-rooms, adorned with pictures cut from the illus- 
trated papers. 

A lull in the political storm gave Jefferson a long interval of 
peace, the last he was to know for many a year. The General Court 
called him to Williamsburg, April 15 and October 15, and detained 

* The Poems of Ossian in the original Gaelic, with a literal Translation into English, and 
a Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems. By the Rev. Archibald Clerk, Minister 
of KilmalUe. Two vols. Eilinburgh. 1871. 



HIS MARRIAGE. 105 

him " eiglateen days exclusive of Sundays " eacli time ; but during 
most of the year he was on his mountain, laying out his grounds, 
planning parts of his house, watching his garden in that vigilant 
manner of his, superintending his widening farms, and keeping brief, 
exact record of whatever he did, observed, and learned. Snow three 
feet deep, as he records soon after reaching home with his bride, 
"the deepest snow we have ever seen," covered the county of Albe- 
marle during the last days of January. It was not an inviting 
prospect for the Italians whom Philip Mazzei was about to start in 
the culture of the vine near by, and who were to furnish Jefferson 
with Italian gardeners. Virginia has a month of polar winter every 
third or fourth year, when the James and the Potomac are ice-bound, 
and the mountain counties are buried in snow. This happy winter 
chanced to be one such. But an early spring atones ; and we are 
relieved, on looking over the published leaves of the young husband's 
garden-book, to discover, that, on March 20, he " sowed a patch of 
later pease." 

The broad summit of his mountain presented a busy scene as the 
season advanced. Men were levelling the summit down to that 
expanse of six acres which was to become so bright with lawn, garden, 
grove, and flowers. Others were cutting roads and paths through 
the woods, or making the drive around the great lawn. Jefferson, 
with his rule in his pocket, and his case of instruments at hand, 
watched every operation with the eye of a curious philosopher, 
pausing often to make a calculation or record a hint. Like a true 
mathematician, he would take nothing for granted. Having wheel- 
barrows with one wheel and others with two wheels, he was bound 
to ascertain, with the certainty of arithmetic, which was the more 
advantageous. So he takes his position, watch in hand, pencil in 
pocket. He discovered that Julius Shard fills a two-wheeled barrow 
in three minutes, and wheels it thirty yards in a minute and a half. 
He observes further, that the two-wheeled barrow holds four times 
as much as the one-wheeled. With these facts before him, he puts the 
case in a form which Professor Small himself would have approved : 
Suppose the 4 loads put in in the same time, viz., 3 minutes ; 4 trips 
will take 4Xl2 = ^') which added to 3' filling is=9', to fill and carry 
the same earth which was filled and carried in the two-wheeled bar- 
row in 4^'." This seems conclusive against the one-wheeled vehicle; 
but, as that form of barrow has held its own against all rivals for 



106 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

another century, we must conclude that Mr. Jefferson's one-wlieeled 
barrow was not a fair representative of its order. He was evidently 
mucli attached to the two-wheeled specimen. 

Every operation was scanned and tested. He observed that a 
four-horse wagon made ten trips a day up the mountain, and brought 
nearly five cords of wood. He counted the number of rails that 
could be drawn up the steepest part of the mountain, and found it 
was twent3''-eight. "A coach and six," he records, "will turn in 
eighty feet." He meant to allow room enough for the grandees of 
Virginia who might visit him to turn homeward. For his own part, 
he had not yet set up a vehicle more imposing than the two-wheeled 
chaise in which he had attempted to bring home his bride. We 
learn, from the same source, that the grounds were to be enclosed by 
a picket-fence, every other picket long, and that the short pickets 
were to have four nails each, and the long ones five. No scrap of 
knowledge came amiss to the young housekeeper. " Mrs. Wythe," 
he records, " puts one-tenth very rich superfine Malmsey to a 
dry Madeira, and makes a fine wine." Tliis item, doubtless, he 
brought home from Williamsburg for his wife, with Mrs. Wythe's 
compliments ; for the lady of the moiintain kept her housekeeping- 
book, and was noted for her skill in household arts. Her books of 
accounts, written in a neat lady-like hand, still exist. 

What an experimenter he was with his garden ! He tried almost 
every valuable nut, vegetable, grain, bulb, shrub, tree, and grass 
the world knows, — almonds, bitter almonds, soft-shelled almonds, 
olives (fifteen hundred olive-stones at once), Alpine strawberries, 
French chestnuts, and all the rare kinds of more familiar fruits and 
vegetables. His new neighbor, Mazzei, filled his garden with the 
fine melons, vines, and nuts of Italj'-, which it was one of Jeiferson's 
dearest delights to spread over Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and 
Georgia. He watched the operations of the Italian vineyard plant- 
ers with the closest attention, and put down in his garden-book a 
curiously minute account of their method of laying out a' vineyard 
and planting vines. The coming of this little Italian colony, 
with the intelligent Mazzei at their head, and the prospect which it 
opened of Albemarle, already called the "garden of Virginia," be- 
coming its vineyard also, was an immense addition to the interest 
and attractiveness of Monticello. If Jefferson loved his home more 
than most men, it must be owned that few men have ever had such 
a home to love. 



HIS MAEEIAGB. .107 

It is the wife who is the soul of a house. It is she who makes, 
who constitutes, who is, the home. The wife of Jefferson comes 
down to us as slie was in this brightest year of her existence, a beau- 
tiful woman, her countenance brilliant with color and expression, 
with luxuriant auburn hair, somewhat tall, and of a very graceful 
figure, though too slight for the wear and tear of this troublesome 
world. Nothing but good has been recorded of her, and her care- 
fully-kept household books still speak her praise. Tradition reports ; 
that she possessed an attraction for her husband, most rare in that 
age among ladies, — an educated mind and a taste for the higher 
literature. Her love of music, her skill in playing the harjisichord, 
and her voice in singing, all harmonized with his tastes and habits, 
recalling that sister so early lost. A Virginian lady of that period 
could scarcely escape acquiring the homely, invaluable wisdom that 
comes of dealing with the common duties of a household. She 
might not be so accomplished as the mother of Washington, who 
was one of the best judges of a horse in her county, and perfectly 
capable of conducting a plantation ; but a woman could not be quite 
a fool who had to think and contrive for a great family of grown-up 
children. 

I see this elegant figure moving about with her husband among 
the improvements of the mountain-top, visiting with him the spot 
where negroes were grubbing up roots and trees for the family 
burying-ground, or standing by his side as he counted the wheel- 
barrow-loads and watched the wall-building. During the winter, 
perhaps, she may have been alive to the inconveniences of living 
five hundred and eighty feet in the air; but in the summer she 
must have warmly approved her husband's choice, if it were only 
that it lifted them above the mosquitoes and all disagreeable, insects. 
If she cast her eyes in one direction, she saw their mount sloping 
down a mile and a half to the Eiver Rivanna; and she could see, half 
a mile beyond the river, the blackened ruins of the house in which 
her husband was born. On another side, the mountain fell off into 
the valley in an almost precipitous descent. From one face of the 
summit there is nothing between the spectator and the ocean, two 
hundred miles distant, and yet not so far that it is not felt in the 
afternoon breeze of the hot summer days. From another, there is a 
vast expanse billowy with mountains, one peak clearly visible forty 
miles off, and the line of the Blue Ridge marked against the horizon 



108* LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

a hundred miles away. Three miles yonder lies the village of 
Charlottesville ; and here is a region of waving wheat fields and 
farms, with the river winding among them. From one point, 
nothing breaks the view for forty-seven miles, and then it ends in a 
solitary peak precisely resembling the great Pyramid of Egypt. 
A lady less susceptible than she could have forgiven the height of 
the little mount for the wide world of loveliness which it dis- 
closed. 

As the summer advanced, she leaned more heavily upon her 
husband's strong arm than before, and less frequently rode down 
into the valley. Their first child was born in the autumn, — that 
Martha Jefferson who contributed most and longest to the solace of 
her father's life. Here was a new tie binding him to his home ; and 
it was wound about his heart at the very period when the events 
occurred that were to summon him away, and detain him many 
times and long. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

AN AFFAIR IN NARBAGANSETT BAY. 

From tlie breezy height of Monticello we must repair to a spot 
not less enchanting, — Newport, the Emerald Isle of North Amer- 
ica. Keaders are familiar with the ocean drive, that winds about 
among the rocks and by the beaches, and past Lily Pond, until it 
turns the Point at the ocean end of the island, and winds round 
past Port Adams, where the band plays; then by the pretty harbor, 
alive with j-achts and skimming sail-boats; and "so home." Bren- 
ton's Point is the ancient and proper name of that turning-place, 
where the carriages stop for their occupants to look out for Point 
Judith and Block Island, and admire the tumbling waves that foam 
over the reefs near the shore, and where children get out to explore 
the aquarium disclosed to view at low tide, and gather star-fish, wet 
and squirming, inadmissible to a well-regulated vehicle. In March, 
1772, it was a bleak and desolate place, without sign of human 
habitation. But even at that early period there was much life upon 
the waters ; for Newport had an important commerce with the 
African coast, and Providence, thirty miles off, at the head of Nar- 
ragansett Bay, though inferior to Newport in wealth and population, 
was a thriving town. Those were th^days when the best Chris- 
tians saw nothing wrong in buying rSJroes and gold-dust on the 
coast of Africa with New-England rum, and selling the negroes to 
the West Indies for molasses, and taking the molasses home to be 
converted into more rum for another voyage. Newport had the 
cream of this sweet commerce for mjjny a year, as well as a legiti- 
mate trade with the mother-country. 

But this was not all the business that enriched Newport and 
Providence. It was not to protect lawful commerce that British 
men-of-war cruised continually in Narragansett Bay, and lay at 

109 



110 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

anchor off Brenton's Point. England was at peace with all the 
world ; the pirates had been driven from these waters ; but in March, 
1772, when Jefferson was sowing his later pease at Monticello, two 
British men-of-war approached the Point, one of some magnitude, 
called the Beaver, and the other, a schooner of eight guns, named 
the Gaspee. The larger of these vessels kept on her course, and 
vanishes from this history. The Gaspee dropped her anchor, furled 
her sails, and remained about where the Light Ship now rides 
uneasily on the waves. 

Need I remind the reader with what rigor England applied the 
protective system at that time ? A colonist could catch a beaver, 
and take off its skin ; but a British law forbade his making that skin 
into a hat. English hatters were protected. A Pennsylvanian might 
dig a piece of iron out of his native hills, and even smelt away its 
impurities ; but he was obliged to send it to England to be made into 
steel and a scythe. British cutlers must be protected. A Virginian 
could raise as much tobacco as he chose ; but, though England were 
glutted with tobacco, he could not export a hogshead of it to another 
country. He must send it all to England, whence British mer- 
chants would distribute it over the world. A Newport merchant 
might discover excellent fabrics and commodities in Holland or 
France ; but he must buy his return cargo in English ports of 
English dealers. A Carolinian could not sell a pound of his indigo 
to France, where so much of it was used. The commerce of the 
colonies, and their internal trade as well, were restricted and ham- 
pered in every way, with the single object, and that object avowed, 
of compelling the colonists to pour the net product of their toil and 
enterprise into British coffers. The colonists complied not unwill- 
ingly, because they loved their country, that is, the British Empire, 
and because they felt, that,^ return for all this, England was bound 
to defend them against theWorld. 

^ But the protective system includes, as an invariable accompani- 
j ment, the illicit trader and the smuggler ; and it will not be one of 
^the least advantages of the universal freedom of trade, which we 
have been approaching for a. century past, and may reach a century 
hence, that those bad vocations will cease to be exercised. Seldom 
have they been so flourishing as in the waters about Newport, from 
the peace of 1763 to the war of 1775. The French War had given 
a wonderful development to the business. A colonial governor had the 



AN AFFAIR IN NAEEAGANSETT BAY. IH 

power to grant a flag of truce, and an enterprising Newporter could 
apply for one under pretext of going to the French West Indies to 
effect an exchange of prisoners. It is mentioned as a proof of the 
incorruptible honor of Governor Fauquier of Virginia, gambler as 
he was, that he refused an offer of two thousand pounds sterling for 
a flag. Other governors were not so scrupulous ; and the governor of 
Rhode Island, who alone was elected by the people of his Province, 
had, it is said, no scruples at all, but granted flags to all applicants 
at a certain price. Give a Yankee captain, in time of war, a 
schooner full of " fish and notions," a flag of truce to the enemy, and 
a free range of the seas; what does he want more? He is trading/ 
with peace advantages, and gets war prices. 

Considering the circumstances, we cannot be surprised at the had 
account given of the Eliode-Islanders by Archdeacon Burnaby, who 
visited them towards the close of the French War. A cunning, 
deceitful people, he calls them, who, " live almost entirely hi/ tinfair 
and illicit trading,^' and their "magistrates are partial and corrupt." 
The English traveller adds this remark: "Were the governor to 
interpose his autliority, were he to refuse to grant flags of truce, or 
not to wink at abuses, he would, at the expiration of the year, be 
excluded from his office, the only thing, perhaps, which he has to sub- 
sist upon." But then, according to this Tory archdeacon, the people 
themselves had little to subsist upon except the illicit trade ; for the 
enemy, in the course of the war, had captured one hundred and 
thirty of their vessels ; and their own privateers, of which they kept 
a great number at sea, had had ill luck. Nevertheless, he says, 
they would, out of their population of thirty-five thousand souls, 
maintain a regiment of provincial troops, which made the taxation 
burdensome. Besides, their paper money was in a woful condition, 
as it required twenty-five hundred pounds in Rhode-Island paper to 
buy one golden guinea. ^ 

The war being at an end in 1763, nothing more could be done in 
the flag-of-truce way ; and a part of this demoralized energy and 
capital was employed in evading the revenue laws. One glance at 
the map will renaind the reader that the waters about Rhode Island 
furnish every facility for any kind of illicit trade that can be carried 
on in small, swift vessels. 

For eight years — 1764 to 1772 — there had been war in Narra- 
gansett Bay, between Rhode Island and the king of Great Britain. 



112 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

The king began it. An offensive armed schooner, the St. John, 
was stationed in the bay in 1764, for the sole purpose of interfering 
with the maritime pursuits of the Ehode Islanders. This St. 
John had the insolence to make a prize of a brig which had 
brought in an unlawful cargo. Retaliation : the people seized a 
shore battery, and fired into the St. John. Eoyal ships impressed 
unwary seamen. On one occasion the Maidstone, man-of-war, 
boarded a brig just from the African coast, and impressed her 
whole crew, who had expected that very night to be at home. Retal- 
iation ; a crowd of Newporters seized one of the Maidstone's 
boats at the Long Wharf, dragged her up Broad Street to the 
Parade, and burnt her in front of that handsome State House 
which still stands. Again, in 1769, the sloop-of-war Liberty, 
besides making herself generally odious through the sleepless vigil- 
ance of her commander. Lieutenant Reid, once stopped and 
brought in an innocent vessel, and then fired at the captain's boat 
when he came seeking redress. Retaliation : a resolute company 
of Newporters boarded her, cut her cables, let her drift ashore, hard 
and fast ; and then, when night fell, a party set her on fire, and she 
was burned to the water's edge ! This was war. 

In 1772 it fell to the little Gaspee, of eight guns, Lieutenant 
Dudingston commanding, to continue the strife. This lieutenant 
was not long in making himself an object of passionate disgust to 
a seafaring people. Lying there, off Brenton's Point, right at the 
entrance of the bay, in the very highway leading both to Newport 
and Providence, he adopted the system of boarding every thing 
that floated, — packets, market-boats, ferry-boats, coasting schoon- 
ers, Indiamen, Londoners, homeward-bound, outward-bound, — 
every thing ! The expedient was simple and obvious, but it was all 
too effectual. And, to make his conduct the more offensive, he 
sent any contraband proper^ that he seized to Boston for adjudica- 
tion. 

At that time the deputy-governor of Rhode-Island Plantation, 
Darius Sessions by name, lived at Providence ; and the governor, 
Joseph Wanton, lived at Newport. Darius Sessions wrote to 
Joseph Wanton a letter of ludicrous gravity, relating the aggres- 
sions of " a schooner " upon " our navigatipn ; " affecting not to 
know " who he is, and by what authority he assumes such a con- 
duct J " and requesting his honor to inquire into the matter. The 



AN AFFAIR IN NARRAGANSETT BAY. 113 

deputy contrived to make a pointed allusion to the sloop " Liberty," 
burnt at Kewport some time before. " It is suspected," said Mr. 
Session, ''that he has no legal authority to justify. his conduct; 
and his commission, if he has any, is some antiquated paper, more 
of a fiction than any thing else, ... no other than the commission 
the famous ileid had, w7io lost his sloop at Newport, or something 
else of no validity." The governor, in the same strain of affected 
ignorance, addressed a note of inquiry to the odious lieutenant, who 
replied, not in the most conciliatory tone, that he " had done noth- 
ing but what was his dut3\" Much correspondence followed. The 
governor wrote to the admiral at Boston, and the admiral replied 
with the hauteur that might be expected : both referred the matter 
to the Earl of Hillsborough ; and the affixir drew to great length 
and complexity. But, in the mean time. Lieutenant Dudingston 
continued to "disturb the navigation" of Xarragansett Bay, and 
seized whatever rum or other commodity had not contributed its 
quota to the king's strong box. 

June 10, 1772, at noon, the regular packet plying between New- 
port and Providence, left Newport for Providence without notifying 
Lieiitenant Dudingston. The Gaspee gave chase ; chased the 
packet up the bay twenty-three miles, and then ran hard aground 
on Narragansett Point, seven miles below Providence. The packet 
reached her berth about sunset. Her captain related his adven- 
ture, and described the situation of the hated Gaspee to Mr. 
John Brown, the most substantial merchant of the place. In 
common with the whole colony, Mr. Brown believed the proceedings 
of Lieutenant Dudingston to be illegal. Deputy-Governor Darius 
Sessions had consulted Chief-justice Hopkins upon the subject, and 
the chief justice had officially pronounced them lawless. No com- 
mander of a vessel, the chief justice maintained, had any right to 
exert authority in the colony without previously applying to the 
governor, showing his warrant for so doing, and being regularly 
sworn in. 

Mr. Brown, like most men who live near the sea, carried the 
tide in his mind, as farmers at work in a distant field observe, with- 
out thinking of it, their taskmaster, the sun. The Gaspee 
cannot get off Namquit Point before three in the morning, thought 
the merchant. The case of the Liberty, perhaps, flashed across 
his mind. The Gaspee had run herself ashore ! What an 



114 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

opportunity to free tlie waters of Rhode Island from this worse 
than a pirate ! 

He spoke to one of the captains in his service, wlio hurried 
away as if on a joj'ful errand. A few minutes later the beating of 
a drum in the main street of Providence summoned the people to 
doors and windows ; and the drummer, in the manner of a town- 
crier, lifted up his voice and proclaimed the situation of the 
Gaspee, and invited all men disposed to lend a hand to her de- 
struction to repair to Sahin's tavern as soon as it was dark. At 
half-past nine, eight of the largest boats belonging to the town, 
with mutfled oars and filled with armed men, each boat com- 
manded by a sea-captain, dropped away from Fenner's Wharf. It 
was no mob that manned the boats. The best men of the town 
took part in this expedition, and all men's hearts went with it ; 
unless it might be some lone representative of the collector of the 
C) customs, — the only officer in Rhode Island not elected by the peo- 
j pie. John Brown, the prime mover, who was in one of the boats, 
/ besides being the chief merchant of the colonj^-, was of the family 
that afterwards founded, and gave its name to. Brown University. 

All on board the Gaspee slept, except one sailor who kept the 
watch. At midnight the watch was changed, when Bartholomew 
Cheever came on deck in his turn. At a quarter to one he descried, 
in the darkness, — the night was very dark, — a line of boats silently 
approaching the vessel. He reported the ominous circumstance to the 
lieutenant, who hurried on deck in his night-shirt, and soon saw the 
boats himself " Hail them," said the officer, " and tell them to stand 
off at their peril." The sailor obeyed. No answer. Again he shouted, 
"Who comes there ?" No answer. The lieutenant himself then 
took his station at the side of the vessel, a pistol in one hand and. a 
cutlass in the other. He hailed the boats twice. From one of 
them came at length an angry reply, which may be softened into, 
"I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, damn you ! I have got 
a warrant to apprehend you, damn you ! So surrender, damn you ! " 
Which was a fiction, uttered by one of the captains commanding, 
"Call all hands," said the lieutenant to Cheever, who obeyed; and 
the men, in the course of a few seconds, began to tumble up. But 
those few seconds were fatal to the Gaspee. 

For, at the instant of Lieutenant Dudingston's appearance at the 
side of his vessel, one of the men in the boats said to a comrade, 



AN APFAIR E^T NABRAGANSETT BAY. 115 

"Reach me your gnn, and I can kill that fellow." Just as the lieu- 
tenant had given the order to call all hands, he fell to the deck, dan- 
gerously wounded in the arm and groin, hleeding profusely. He 
had not yet been helped to the cabin before the assailants boarded, 
drove the men below, and were masters of the vessel. The Provi- 
dence men followed the crew into the hold, tied every man's hands 
behind him, and prepared to set them ashore. 

A young medical student, while busy below tying the hands of the 
unresisting crew, was called to the deck by a voice familiar to all 
the party. "What is the matter, Mr. Brown?" asked the student. 
" Don't call names," was the reply, "but go immediately into the 
cabin. There is one wounded, and will bleed to death." Upon 
examining the wound the student feared the great artery was cut, 
and began to pull and tug at the collar of his own shirt to tear a 
bandage. The wounded man showed that he was worthy of better 
work than chasing packet-boats, and groping after hidden rum, by 
saying, " Pray, sir, don't tear your clothes : there is linen in that 
trunk." And, after his wound was dressed, he begged the young 
surgeon to accept a gold stock -buckle as a mark of his gratitude ; 
and, this being refused, he pressed upon him a silver one, which the 
student accepted, and wore to old age. The crew were landed in two 
parties, two miles apart, and the lieutenant was carried to a house 
near the shore. The schooner was then set on fire. 

When the sun rose, nothing remained of her but a black and 
smoking hulk. The assailants rowed home at leisure in broad day- 
light, reaching Providence in time for breakfast. So little conceal- 
ment was there, that, in the course of the morning, a young man 
appeared in the most public place in Providence with Lieutenant 
Pudingston's gold-laced hat upon his head, and related to a great 
circle of admiring bystanders how and where he had got it in the 
schooner's cabin. He was induced to retire with his trophy ; but 
every American in Providence knew who had done the deed, who 
suggested it, and what part in it each of the leading persons had 
borne. 

Darius Sessions's parents must have been devoid of a sense of the 
ludicrous, else he had not been blessed with such a name ; but Dari- 
us himself was a humorist.- In the morning he received the "news" 
of this transaction. Whereupon he rode down to the scene, attended 
by some gentlemen of the town, to inquire into it. He found the 



116 ' LIFE or THOMAS JEFFEKSO]^. 

thing had really happened. Here was the smoking hulk. In yon- 
der house lay the wounded officer. The crew were roaming at large, 
subsisting on the country. He visited the lieutenant, and begged 
to know how he could be of service to him. That truly gallant 
officer replied, that, for his own part, he wanted nothing ; he hardly 
expected to survive ; but he asked to have his men attended to, and 
sent to the admiral in Boston. The deputy took sundry depositions, 
provided for the crew, and returned home to exercise his talent for 
grave burlesque in a letter to the governor. " A very disagreeble 
aifair," said he, "has lately happened within this part of the col- 
ony." He related the disagreeable affair. Then he remarked, 
"The dangerous tendency of this transaction is too obvious to pass 
it over with the least ajypearance of neglect." He did not under- 
line the word " appearance : " it was not necessary. He concluded 
his epistle thus: " It is the prevailing opinion of the gentlemen in 
this quarter, that a proclamation, with a large reward, be issued for 
apprehending the persons .who have thus offended; You will jjlease 
consult the gentlemen your way; and, iu the mean time, I will 
endeavor to collect the sentiments of the members of the Assembly, 
and other principal gentlemen by name, and send the same to your 
honor as soon as may be." va,. 

Governor Wanton acted upon this hint. A proclamation was very 
promptly issued, offering a reward of a hundred pounds to any one 
who should discover the perpetrators. Strange to say, the proclama- 
tion was of no effect. Not a person in Rhode Island disclosed 
what many hundretls of men, women, and children must have per- 
sonally known. Lieutenant Dudingston recovered his health, was 
recommended for promotion, and, it is to be hoped, obtained it. 
Other cruisei's replaced the burnt Gaspee. Karragansett Bay was 
as blue and bright as before, its islands as richly verdured, and all 
things went their usual train. 

No one can understand the importance of this affiiir unless he 
bears in mind that the great controversy of which it was one trifling 
outbreak was a controversy between the colonists and one man. 
That one man was the king, — poor, dull, proud, ignorant, moody 
George III., — the costliest king a country was ever cursed with. 
He cost, in fact, £800,000,000, besides his board and the loss of 
thirteen colonies ; for it was he, that one blind, unteachable dunce, 
who severed the empire. 

Of course there are always men enough to flatter the foibles of a 



AN AFFAIR IN NAEKAGANSETT BAY. 117 

king. The American Tories exulted in the destruction of the Gas- 
pee. If this does not wake the British lion, wrote Governor Hutch- 
inson of Massachusetts, no one will ever tremhle at his roar again ! 
" So daring an insult ! " By men, too, who are perfectly well known, 
and yet not one arrested ! The royal animal has been asleep these 
four or five years past ; as if these turbulent colonists could be ruled 
by soft words, and milk-white steeds drawing great lords in gor- 
geous coaches ! A gracious king sees with what result. A ?cinr/s 
lieutenant wounded, and turned out of his vessel ! Governor Hutch- 
inson had the honor of conversing with Admiral Montagu on the 
subject ; and he rejoiced to hear the admiral state, that, in his opinion, 
Lord Sandwich would " never leave pursuing the colony until it was 
disfranchised." Goveriior Hutchinson's own opinion, as recorded 
for the perusal of the home government, was this : " If the late 
affair at Rhode Island is passed, over without a full inquiry and due 
resentment, our liberty people will think they may with impunity 
commit any acts of violence, be they ever so atrocious ; and the friends 
to government will despond, and give up all hopes of being able to 
withstand the faction." 

The home government needed no prompting. The lion was 
awake. The " law-servants of the crown " pronounced the act of 
the Rhode Islanders high treason, levying war against the king. 
Five royal commissioners — the governor of Rhode Island, the chief 
justices of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and a judge 
of the Boston Vice-admiralty Court — were appointed to go to Rhode 
Island, and investigate the fell business. General Gage, command- 
ing the troops at Boston, was ordered to hold himself in readiness to 
assist the commissioners, if they should need assistance. Governor 
Wanton received this information from England about the 1st of 
October in a long despatch from Lord Dartmouth ; and the material 
parts of this document found their way into the newspapers. Secrecy 
would have been desirable, if the governor had meant to execute the 
king's commands ( but important matters will get into the papers 
in times of public commotion, if the pigeon-hole is not well looked 
to. There was one paragraph in Lord Dartmouth's despatch which 
arrested every intelligent mind in the colonies, and kindled every 
patriotic heart, Jefferson read it at Monticello with feelings inex- 
pressible. Dabney Carr read it in his cabin full of children, and, 
I doubt not, rode swiftly to his brother-in-law, Jefferson, to talk it 
over : — 



118 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEHSOX. 

" It is his majesty's intention, in consequence of tlie advice of his 
Privv Council, that the persons concerned in the burning of the 
Gaspee schooner, and in the otlier violences which attended that 
daring insult, should be brought to England to be tkied ; 
and I am therefore to signify to you his majesty's pleasure," that 
the prisoners, together with the witnesses on both sides, shall 
be delivered to the custody of Admiral Montagu, and sent in a king's 
ship to England ! 

The commissioners arrived at iSTewport. They offered a reward 
of a thousand pounds sterling to any one who would reveal or betray 
the ringleaders, and five hundred pounds for the detection of any 
other person concerned. Before entering upon their duties they all 
swore and subscribed the three great oaths, so pertinent to the 
occasion. Eirst, they swore they did not believe the doctrine of 
transubstantiation, and that they regarded the invocation of the 
Virgin Mary and the sacrifice of the mass as superstitious and 
idolatrous. Secondly, they swore that they considered George III. 
the true king of Great Britain, and rejected the Pretender, who 
called himself James III. Thirdly, they swore, that, from their 
hearts, they abhorred, detested, and abjured, as impious and hereti- 
cal, the damnable doctrine and position, that the Pope could depose 
a king by pronouncing him excommunicate. These three tremen- 
dous oaths, drawn out to great length, having been duly sworn, 
recorded, and signed, the commissioners proceeded to business. It 
was in the Newport State House, in that large room into which 
summer visitors peep, and admire the quaint carpentry of other 
days, that these solemn things were done. 

The commissioners summoned witnesses, took depositions, ad- 
journed, met again, sat long and often, made up a voluminous 
report, and discovered nothing ! Not one man was so much as 
arrested ! Every witness that knew any thing about the matter 
staid at home, and sent an excuse. Some had causes coming on at 
court. One had "a swelling in the hand." Another was seventy- 
four years of age. Sabin, at whose house the assailants had met, and 
wdiere they had spent an hour and a half in casting bullets and sharp- 
ening cutlasses, sent the following, which may serve as a sample : — 

"Gentlemen, I now address you on account of a summons I 
received from you, requiring my attendance at the Council Chamber 
in Newport on Wednesday, 20th instant. 



AN AFFAIE, IN NAERAGANSETT BAY. 119 

"Now, gentlemen, I beg to acquaint you what renders me incapa- 
ble of attending. I am an insolvent debtor ; and, therefore; my 
person would be subject to an arrest by some one or other of my 
creditors ; and my health has been on a decline for these two 
months past, and it would be dangerous should I leave my house. 

''And, further, were I to attend, T could give no information 
relative to the assembling, arming, training, and leading on the peo- 
ple concerned in the destroying the schooner Gaspee. 

" On the 9th day of June last, at night, I was employed at my 
house, attending company ; who were John Andrew, Esq., Judge of 
the Court of Vice-admiralty, John Cole, Esq., Mr. Hitchcock, and 
George Brown, who supped at my house, and staid there until two 
of the clock in the morning following; and I have not any 
knowledge relative to the matter on which I am summoned." * 

And so said they all, namely, George Brown, Mr. Hitchcock, 
Judge Andrews, and John Cole, Esq., none of whom could attend 
the honorable commissioners, though they found time to write ex- 
cuses protesting the densest ignorance of the whole affair. In 
a word, the investigation was an absolute nullity and farce. 
Those five commissioners, with all the aid the king could give 
them, with his fleet, his army, and his thousand pounds, could not, 
after five months' trying, discover what every boy in the streets 
knew, and what they themselves knew, as mere men. The publi- 
city given to Lord Dartmouth's despatch would alone have defeated 
its object, even if the commissioners had been in earnest. 

The affair might have ended here ; but the king's friends were 
now in the ascendency in Parliament, and they must needs invest 
this folly with the importance and permanence of law. An act was 
passed for the better protection of the navy and its appurtenances, 
which made it a capital offence to destroy any object belonging to a 
king's vessel. The act was so worded, that a man who should cut 
a button from a drunken marine's coat, or knock in the head of a 
royal beef-barrel, was to be presumed a traitor to the king, and could 
be sent for trial to any county in England. 

* A History of the Destruction of his Britannic Majesty's Schooner Gaspee in Narragan- 
sett Bay. By Jolin Russell Bartlett, Secretary of State of Rhode Island. P. 102. Provi- 
dunce. 1871. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE EFFECT i:S" VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 

It were difficult to exaggerate the interest wliich this affair 
excited throughout the colonies. The audacious gallantry of the 
Providence men was the first theme of admiration ; and, hefore that 
had become an exhausted topic, rumors of coming vengeance from 
England renewed the public interest in it. Lord Dartmouth's 
despatch, the arrival of the commissioners, and their solemn sessions 
at Newport, still kept all minds attentive. The absurd failure of 
the royal commission does not seem to have allayed the popular re- 
sentment. Finally, the act of Parliament fixing the Rhode Island 
precedent into imperial law convinced all but the most reluctant 
that the king was resolved upon forcing the controversy to au 
armed issue. Students familiar with the period receive the impression 
that it was the burning of the Gaspee, more than the throwing 
overboard of the tea, that led to the Boston Port Bill, and so precip- 
itated the Revolution. 

One evening in the early part of March, 1772, six or seven gentle- 
men sat about a table in a private room of the Raleigh Tavern at 
Williamsburg, Va. They were all members of the House of 
Burgesses, — Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, his brother Fran- 
cis Lightfoot Lee, Thomas Jefferson, his brother-in-law Dabney 
Carr, and one or two others. Rhode Island had been for weeks upon 
every tongue. It was not yet known that the scenes enacting in 
the Newport State House were comedy instead of tragedy. Para- 
graphs of fearful import circulated in the newspapers from colony 
to colony. It looked, for a time, as though poor little Rhode Island 
was, about to be extirpated ; for Admiral Montagu was going there 
with a fleet, General Gage with an army; the inquisition had 
already been set up ; and every man whom it chose to arrest was to 

120 



THE EFFECT IN VIBGINIA AND ELSEWHEEE. 121 

be sent tliree thousand miles away for trial. Rhode Island was the 
least of the colonies; and it seemed as if, for that reason, she had 
been first marked for vengeance. But the lawless court then sitting 
at Newport an infuriate ministry could transfer to "Williamsburg, 
and order fleets and armies to Virginia to execute its decrees ! At 
such a crisis, what does it become the most powerful of the colonies 
to do on behalf of the weakest? 

This was the question which those gentlemen were discussing at 
the E-aleigh Tavern that night. They were of the younger mem- 
bers of the House ; and they had met by themselves, because they 
feared their elders would hesitate to act with the requisite prompt- 
ness and spirit. Their object was to hit upon a course which should Q 
be moderate enough for the Tories, while being decided enough 
for the Whigs. Virginia, they all felt, must stand by Rhode Island. 
The colonies must make common cause. But it was requisite to 
proceed with moderation. 

We shall never appreciate what it cost some of the Virginians to 
fall into line with the Northern colonies on these occasions. The 
ideal of New England, as we plainly see in all the memorials of the 
first century, was Israel ; but Virginia's beloved and honored model 
was England: and both were equally cramped by the inadequacy 
of their pattern. When the coast of British North' America was 
divided, it was the northern half that should have been called Vir- ^ 
ginia, and the southern half New England ; for it was in the south- 
ern half that another England was to be attempted. There the - "' 
Church of England was to be established ; there primogeniture and — 
entail were to perpetuate county families ; there the laborer was to — 
be ignorant, poor, and hopeless; there the government was to be ■' 
an imitation of king, lords, and commons; there tlie king was to 
be the source of honor ; there that inexplicable, complex, omnipotent 
influence, the social tone, was to be English, only English, and that 
exceedingl3^ For a century or more it was Virginia's favorite vanity 
to differ from New England in just that very particular which the - 
present crisis called upon her to disregard. __~ 

In 1G74, when the agents of Virginia were in London trying to / 
get their rights secured by a charter, they were opposed on the 
ground of New England's recent adherence to Cromwell. The 
agents replied. No disobedience of New England ought to cause 
apprehension of the same on the part of Virginia; for the people of 



122 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

New England " steer a quite contrary course " from us Virginians. 
They endeavor, as much as tliey can, to " sever themselves from the 
crown ; " whereas our ''chief desire is to be assured of our perpet- 
ual, immediate dependence thereon." They discover antimonarchical 
principles ; they love a republican form of government, which is 
something distinct and independent from the policy of England. 
But we " are and ever have been heartily affectionate and loyal to the 
monarchy of England ; " and the government of Virginia is " con- 
stituted, as we humbly conceive, in imitation of it." They have 
obtained power of choosing their own governor. We, on the con- 
trary, " would not have that power, but desire our governor may be 
from time to time appointed by the king." " The New Englanders 
imagine great felicity in their form of government, civil and ecclesi- 
astical, under which they were trained up to disobedience to the 
crown and church of England ; but the Virginians would think 
themselves very unhappy to be obliged to accept of and live under a 
government so constituted." 

1 ^ J Every Virginian heart would have responded to these sentiments. 
But, with all thi'S loyalty to the king, there was a deeper attachment 
to what they called the rights of Englishmen, and especially to 
that fundamental right, without which no other has validity, — the 
right of self-taxation. The Province, for a century and a half, was 
never suffered long to forget that great right and the means of pre- 
serving it. The people had a special drill and training in Magna 
Charta. Old men long remembered, and told their descendants, that 
all was chaos in Virginia for the first fourteen j^ears ; until the first 
House of Burgesses convened at Jamestown, — their "darling 
assembly," as one of the old historians styles it. During fifty-three 
years more it was the first object of Virginians to secure this right 
of self-gOTernment by a royal charter. Curiously enough, the first 
king who recognized their parliament was the monarch who lost his 
head by trying *to govern England without one. Young Charles I. 
wrote them a letter, scolding them for founding their colony upon 
tobacco-smoke, and advising them to turn their attention to potash, 
staves, iron, and salt ; but he offered them three shillings a pound 
for their whole crop of tobacco, and told them to convene an Assem- 
bly to consider and decide upon the proposition. To the moment of 
that king's decapitation, Virginia sided with the Commonwealth men, 
as England herself did. Once, in 1654, the tobacco lords in the Bur- 



THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 123 

gesses disfranchised all their constituents, except these who pos- 
sessed a certain quantity of land. The act was repealed two years 
after, and for reasons which Jefferson himself might have dictated, 
and which, doubtless, his ancestors approved. It was unreasonable and 
unnatural, said the preamble to the repealing act, that men who con- 
tributed to the support of government and the defence of the coun- 
try should be deprived of their chartered and natural rights by the 
very servants whom they had chosen to watch over their interests. 

A long series of events could be adduced to show that the funda- 
mental rights of citizens were familiar and dear to Virginians from 
1621 onward to the time of the Stamp Act. Every doctrine of the 
Revolutionary period can be found, expressed with force and intelli- 
gence, in the public papers of the Province a century before the 
meeting of the first Congress. Despite that sentimental loj^alty of 
theirs, the yeomen of Virginia were distinctly aware that their col- 
ony had been " deduced " not at the king's expense, and defended 
not by the Icing's troops, and supported not by the king's treasure ; 
and that, in founding a colony which cost the king nothing, and 
yielded him a revenue of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, they had 
certainly not lost any of the rights of Englishmen. 

Sentiment, however, is a potent influence, particularly when it is 
allied with vanity. It is hard for men to profess opinions to which 
the stigma of vulgarity has been affixed ; and, in Virginia, loyalty 
to church and king was regarded as the trait of a gentleman. And, 
ridiculous as it seems, those twelve councillors whom the governor 
recommended and the king appointed, — the only Virginians who 
could, with any show of legality, claim precedence of the rest — 
were held in extravagant respect. There was a large circle of fami- 
lies with whom the object of ambition was to see one of their mem- 
bers appointed to a seat in the Council Chamber. Sentiment, vanity, 
interest, tradition, habit, united to bind the heads of great families 
in close array around the viceregal throne. The excellent Botetourt, 
too, had now been replaced by the rash, ignorant, and reckless Lord 
Dunmore, with his cormorant factotum extorting illegal fees, and a 
numerous family of sons and daughters, who were striving to intro- 
duce into society at Williamsburg rules of precedence similar to 
those which prevailed in European courts. Eool as he was, he had 
his courtiers and his votaries. " The palace " was still a social force, 
as well as a political one. 



124 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

Our young burgesses, therefore, who were closeted at the Raleigh 
Tavern, could recommend nothing very bold or decisive. Besides, 
they came of a race whose words are apt to be moderate and few 
when their intent is most serious and unchangeable ; not inclined 
to threaten until they are ready with the stroke. 

Two years and a half before, the Massachusetts Assembly had 
appointed a committee of correspondence, of five members, to com- 
municate with their agent and others in England, and with the 
speakers of the several colonial legislatures, upon subjects of common 
concern ; anA, once or twice, circular letters had been sent by the 
House to the speakers of the various assemblies. Acting upon this 
hint (though without thinking of it at the time), the young gentle- 
men determined to propose to their House to establish a Standing 
Committee of eleven members, for the sole purpose of getting and 
transmitting to sister colonies the earliest intelligence of such acts 
of the administration and of Parliament as related to America; to 
instruct this committee to inquire at once into the affair at Rhode 
Island ; and to invite each of the other colonial legislatures to 
appoint a similar committee. This measure was to be urged as a 
means of "quieting the minds of his viajesti/s faithful subjects in 
this colony,'" which had been " much disturbed by various rumors 
and reports of proceedings tending to deprive them of their ancient 
legal and constitutional rights." 

Tlie resolutions having been drawn, Jefferson was asked to offer 
f> them to the House the next morning. He preferred to assign this 
task to his brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, a new member, as yet 
unheard in the House, but endowed, as Jefferson believed, with emi- 
nent talents for debate. Mr. Carr consenting, the company broke up, 
Carr and Jefferson going to their lodgings together. As they walk- 
ed homeward, they conversed upon the utility and probable effects 
of such committees of correspondence ; and they agreed in thinking 
that the measure must lead, and that speedily, to a Congress of 
Deputies from all the colonies, for the purpose of presenting a 
united front to these strange aggressions, and of concerting the best 
methods of opposition. If eitiier of them had ever heard of the 
Massachusetts committee of 1770, they had forgotten it. That com- 
mittee's chief object had been correspondence with agents in 
London. ISTo s?/5feHi of interchanging news and ideas had resulted 
from its appointment. They felt then, and always felt, that theirs 
was an original measure. 



THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 125 

Tlie next morning Dabney Carr rose to address the House for the 
first time. A general favorite, every one wished him success ; and 
lie spoke to men alarmed at the events transpiring in Rhode Island, 
The resolutions were read. He supported them in a speech which 
tradition reports to have been a liappy blending of boldness, pru- 
dence, and courtesy. How harmless the measure suggested! What 
more proper than for legislative bodies to procure prompt, exact in- 
formation ! He reconciled nearly every mind to the wisdom and 
propriety of the scheme ; and, when he sat down, the faces of the 
little parliament beamed with generous joy as in the triumph of a 
friend. Forty-three years after, Jefferson told a son of the j^oung 
speaker how well he remembered the pleasure which shone in the 
countenances of the Assembly at the conclusion of the speech, and 
the buzz of applauding remark that followed it. The resolutions 
were carried with a near aj^proach to unanimity. The members of 
the committee were Peyton Randolph, R. C. Nicholas, Richard 
Bland, R; H. Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, Patrick 
Henry, Dudley Digges, Dabney Carr, Archibald Gary, and Thomas '0 
Jefferson. 

The session ended on the day following; but the committee 
remained long enough to prepare and despatch a circular letter to 
the colonial assemblies, explaining the object of their appointment, 
and requesting each of them to designate a similar committee with 
whom they could regularly communicate. What a part these com- 
mittees played in the times that followed need not be told ! Every 
county, every village, came to have its committee, the power of 
which increased as the public alarm increased. No j)ower is so 
terrible as the organ of a public terror. Some of the innumerable 
committees, American and French, that sprang into being through 
that meeting in the Raleigh Tavern, abused their power; but the 
Committees of Correspondence — forerunner and cause of the Con- 
tinental Congress — secured the independence of the colonies. The O 
author of the scheme lived to see its success in one Revolution, and 
its fearful abuse in another. 

The sympathy of the most powerful — or, at least, the most 
imposing and famous — of the colonies with the smallest and 
weakest touched every generous heart in America, and led the way 
to that predominance of Virginia which made her by and by the 
" mother of Presidents." The Assembly of Massachusetts hailed 



126 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOI!^. 

with warm applause the wise and firm conduct of Virginia at all 
times, and especially in thus making the cause of Rliode Island her 
own. The Khode-Island Legislature, in one of its resolves, spoke of 
" the glorious Assembly of Virginia." Tlie young burgesses had 
every reason to be satisfied with the results of their measure. 

The session being ended, Jefferson and Carr resumed their pro- 
fessional duties. If they rode homeward together, as is probable, 
Jefferson was obliged to return soon to the April term of the Gen- 
eral Court a-t Williamsburg ; and his brother-in-law had causes to 
plead in the county court held at Charlottesville, the village that 
lay within sight of Monticello. Dabney Carr, then eight 3'ears 
married, had, as I have said, his little house full of little children. 
The sixth was born about the time of his coming from his first ses- 
sion, flushed with the triumph of his maiden speech. He was com- 
pelled to leave home again before his wife was strong enough to sit 
up. Her spirits sank at the thought of his leaving her, and she 
was oppressed with forebodings of evil. He took his leave of her, 
and mounted his horse for his journey to Charlottesville. When 
she heard his horse's steps upon the road under her window, she 
raised herself feebly in bed to catch one last look at him; but she 
only could get high enough to see his hat, as it swayed to the 
motion of the horse. Soon after reaching Charlottesville he wag 
seized with a malignant type of typhoid fever, the course of which 
was so rapid that he could not be moved even so far as Monticello, 
and he died before Jefferson heard that he was in danger. 

The news of this desolating stroke came near depriving his chil- 
dren of a mother. She lost her reason for a time ; during which she 
could see only the moving phantom of a Hat, as she had seen her 
husband's when he passed her window. When reason returned, and 
for many weeks after, still that maddening hat would not vanish 
from her sight.* It was long before she could bend her mind to 
the new duties which the event devolved upon her. 

In this sudden desolation of her young life, her brother was 
literally a tower of refuge to her ; for he took her, and all her help- 
less brood, home to Monticello, which thenceforth became their 
home, as he their father. He reared and educated all those six chil- 
dren — three sons and three daughters — with the same care, 

♦ Kandall'a JcSerson, i. 84. 



THE EFFECT IK VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 127 

tenderness, and liberality as his own. He nurtured their infancy ; 
he directed their studies ; he guided their entrance into active life ; 
two of the sons pursuing with distinguished success his own profes- 
sion. ISTor did he ever, during the long series of years when he 
had offices to give awaj', quarter one of them, or one of their chil- 
dren, upon the public. When he reached home, he found that his 
friend had been buried at Shadwell. Mindful of the romantic agree- 
ment of their youth, that, whichever died last, should bury the 
other under the giant oak on Monticello, beneath which they had 
read and talked during long summer daj's, he caused the remains to 
be removed, and mused over an inscription proper for the tombstone. 
He wrote one, which recorded the usual brief outline of a human 
life, and ended it with these words : " To his virtue, good sense, 
learning, and friendship, this stone is dedicated by Thomas Jeffer- 
son, who, of all men living, loved him most.'" He thought of these 
lines to accompany the inscription, from the Excursion of Mallet : — 

" Lamented Shade, whom every gift of Heaven 
Profusely blest ; a temper winning, mild ; 
Nor pity softer, nor was truth more bright. 
Constant in doing well, he neither sought 
Nor shunned applause. No bashful merit sighed 
Near him neglected. Sympathizing, he 
Wiped oif the tear from Sorrow's clouded eye 
With kindly hand, and taught her heart to smile." 

These melancholy duties done, there remained for Jefferson a vast 
increase to the joy of his home ; the play and prattle of six affection- 
ate children, their opening intelligence, their abundant love, their 
six countenances speaking welcome when he returned, and luring 
him while away. He bad the instinct of the parent and of tlie 
tutor, and both unusually strong; so strong that his own family could 
not have sufficed for their gratification. Science will one day tell us 
^vhy the children of such a pair should have had so slight, so pre- 
carious, a hold upon life. At present we have to be content with 
the miserable fact. Their first child, Martha, inherited a constitu- 
tion sufficiently robust ; their second lived but five months ; their 
third only seventeen days ; their fourth child was Mary, who 
grew to womanhood ; their fifth lived five months ; and their sixth 
two years. All of them were girls, except the one that lived seven- 



128 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

teen days. The youngest, who survived two years, seemed all 
spirit. She listened to music with rapture, and had an organization 
so finely attuned, that a false note brought tears to her eyes. But 
Jefferson was hlest in this, that his mountain-top at every period of 
his long life was alive and merry with a swarm of children besides 
his own. 

We know so little of Mrs. Jefferson, that the least thing which 
concerns her has interest. Three glimpses of their home life are 
afforded in the memorials of these happy years. In one record we see 
her teaching " the little Cans " the beginnings of knowledge, along 
with her own child. In another the dense veil of a hundred years is 
lifted for a moment, and we hear her blaming her husband for some 
generous deed of his which had met with an ungrateful return. 
" But," she immediately added, in a gush of admiring affection, " it 
was always so with him : he is so good himself, that he cannot under- 
stand how bad other people may be." In anotlier we witness a short 
domestic scene, in which appear three characters, -^father, mother, 
and child. For some trifling fault the child had undergone a trifling 
punishment. Some time after, being again in disgrace, her mother 
reminded her of the painful circumstance. The too sensitive Mar- 
tha, deeply wounded at what seemed a taunt, turned away with a 
swelling heart, and eyes filled with tears ; but, before she had gone 
beyond hearing, she heard her father say to her mother, in the low 
tone of affectionate remonstrance, " My dear, a fault in so young a 
child, once punished, should be forgotten." The child never forgot 
the passion of grateful love that filled her heart as these words caught 
her ear.* 

The year 1773 wore away. The next year was the one decisive of 
the controversy between the colonies and the king. When the year 
1774 opened, Thomas Jefferson was a thriving young lawyer, not 
known even by name beyond his native Province ; when it closed, 
he was a person of note among the patriots of America, and had won 
the honor of being proscribed by name in England. 

The spring found him as usual in liis seat in the House of Bur- 
gesses. As, in 1773, the ej'es of the continent were fixed upon Nar- 
ragansett Bay, so now, in 1774, every mind was intent upon Boston 
Harbor. The wrath of a misguided king was kindled against the 

* Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, p. 341. 



THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHEEE. 129 

Bostonians. They had not equalled the Rhode Islanders in audacity ; 
they had not burnt a king's vessel, nor wounded a king's lieutenant ; 
but a few of them had taken the liberty of throwing some chests of 
tea into the harbor. The ministry, instructed by their failure in 
Rhode Island, made no attempt to discover the doers_ of this deed. 
They offered no reward, and appointed no commissioners. They 
held the whole population guilty, and closed the port ; which, in an 
instant, suspended the business of the town, and deprived it of the 
means of subsistence. So do some unskilful schoolmasters, when they 
cannot detect a culprit, " keep in '' the whole school, and put every 
boy upon bread and water. 

Once more Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the two Lees, and a 
few other choice spirits, met to consider what part it became Virginia 
to take in this new crisis. Expedients appeared to be exhausted : at 
least, all appeals to the powers on the other side of the ocean had 
proved fruitless. The youtig Whigs in conference concluded that 
the next thing in order was to rouse the people of Virginia to a more 
vivid sense of the deadly peril to their liberty. The Boston Port 
Bill was to go into operation on the 1st of June. They determined 
to get the House, if they could, to appoint that day as one of public 
fasting and humiliation, to be observed by services in all the parish 
churches. Between the end of the session and the day designated, 
there would be time for members to go to their counties, and inspire 
the clergy with the feeling proper to the occasion. '• We cooked up 
a resolution," Jefferson records, " somewhat modernizing the Puritan 
phrases, appointing the first day of June for a day of fasting, humil- 
iation, and prayer, to implore Heaven to avert from us the evils of 
civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to 
turn the hearts of the king and parliament to moderation and justice." 

Jefferson never invited failure by neglecting obvious precautions, 
or disregarding the small proprieties. He was aware, that, if this 
resolution and its pious preamble were offered by himself, or by his 
merry friend Patrick Henry, or by any of the younger Whigs, the 
incongruity would not escape remark. The head of the bar, Mr. ^ 
Nicholas, a grave, religious gentleman, was asked to offer it to the 
Burgesses. He complied with the request, and the resolution passed 
without opposition. 

Lord Dunmore dissolved the House. The members, as in Lord 
Botecourt's time, assembled the next morning in the Apollo. 



130 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 

Momentous meeting! Tliej did a few quiet things, in their 
usual quiet, courteous way ; but two of them were things tliat proved 
decisive, irreversible, revolutionary. They agreed to buy no more 
tea. They instructed the committee of correspondence to propose 
an Anxual Congress of deputies from all the colonies. They 
agreed to meet on the 1st of August, at Williamsburg, to elect the 
Virginia members of that congress. They declared that an attack 
on the rights of one colony was an attack on all. Then they broke 
up, and hurried home to rouse the clergy to make the very utmost 
of the opportunity about to be afforded them on the Fast Day. 

The Fast was universally observed ; and its effect, as Jefferson 
thought, was most salutary. The people, he says, met at their parish 
churches with anxiety and alarm in their faces ; for no solemnity of 
the kind had been held in nineteen years, not since the daj^s of ter- 
ror after Braddock's defeat. The minister of his own parish was 
Charles Clay (cousin of Henry Clay), a man fully alive to the occa- 
sion, whose fervid oratory was heard all through the Revolutionary 
period, nerving the people to dare and endure. " The cause of lib- 
erty is the cause of God ! " he once exclaimed in the course of a 
sermon on a fast day. " Cursed be he," was another of his sen- 
tences, " who keepeth back his sword from blood in this war ! " 
" The effect of the day," wrote Jefferson many years after, thinking, 
doubtless, of what he had heard and seen in Albemarle, " was like a 
shock of electricity, arousing every man, and placing him erect and 
solidly on his centre." 

All that summer Boston, suffering, impoverished Boston, lay upon 
every heart. Each Province, county, city, town, neighborhood, sent 
its contribution to supply the needs of the people, suddenly deprived 
of their occupation. The port being closed on the 1st of June, the 
day of the year when the stock of food in a country reaches its low- 
est point, the farmers could not at first be as liberal as they wished; 
but they did what they could. Windham (Conn, began the work 
of relief Before the month of June ended, Windham sent in, with a 
cordial letter of applause and sympathy, "a small flock of sheep, 
which, at this season, are not so good as we could wish, but are the 
best we had." Two hundred and fifty-eight was Windham's notion 
of the number of sheep that go to " a small flock." Groton (Mass.) 
sent forty bushels of grain ; Wrentham, one load of grain ; Pepperill, 
forty bushels ; Charlemout, two barrels of flour ; Farmington, between 



THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 1-31 

three and four hundred bushels of rye and corn ; and fertile Weth- 
ersfield, nearly eight hundred bushels of grain, with promise of more 
after harvest. 

New Jersey soon wrote to say that she, too, was making contri- 
butions, and would be glad to know whicli would be most acceptable 
to a suffering sister, cash or produce. Cash, replied Boston, if 
perfectly convenient. North Carolina promptly sent two sloop- 
loads of provisions. The Marblehead fishermen were so liberal as 
to forward " two hundred and twenty-four quintals of good eating- 
fish, one barrel and three-quarters of good olive-oil, and thirty-nine 
pounds, five shillings, and three pence in cash." South Carolina's 
first gift was one hundred casks of rice. '' Baltimore town " contrib- 
uted three thousand bushels of corn, twenty barrels of rye-flour, 
two barrels of pork, and twenty barrels of bread. Virginia, — there 
seemed to be no end to Virginia's gifts ! A cargo of corn was her 
first offering; Alexandria followed soon with a present of tliree hun- 
dred and fifty pounds in money; and the several counties kept 
forwarding cargoes and large consignments of corn, all through the 
autumn and winter. In all, Virginia contributed about ten thou- 
sand bushels of what one forwarder styled, in his letter, " donation 
.grain," besides several sums of money from villages and individuals. 
"Hold out long enough," wrote a gentleman in the South, "and 
Boston will become the granary of America." 

As the cool season approached, the agricultural towns became 
more liberal. Lebanon drove in "three hundred and seventy-six fat 
sheep ; " Norwich, tw;o hundred and ninety-one ; Groton, one hun- 
dred and twenty ; Brooklyn, one hundred and twenty-five ; East 
Haddam, " a drove of sheep and cattle." The Maryland counties 
were extremely liberal : each sent its thousand or ttro thousand 
bushels of corn. From cold and remote Quebec came "a small O 
quantity of wlieat ; " from Montreal, a hundred pounds sterling. 
What droves of sheep kept streaming into Boston, when the tem- 
perature favored driving ! From every little mountain town in New 
Hampshire and Vermont came sheep, — fifty, sixty-five, one hundred, 
in a flock. Hartford sent off, after harvest, seven hundred and 
thirty-eigltt bushels of rye and one hundred and eleven bushels of 
corn, its ''small but free gratuity." Berwick, with apologies for the 
smallness of its gift, sent six oxen and twenty-six sheep. Many 
towns and some Provinces, which out of the summer's scarcity had 



132 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

contributed liberally, contributed a second time from the autumn's 
fat abundance. Groton did so and Marblebead, New Jersey and 
Baltimore. 

Individual donations swelled tlie tide of benefaction. Samuel 
Moody treated himself to a gift of five guineas. Philadelphia raised 
two thousand pounds, and forwarded it, part in provisions, part in 
iron, part in money. Providence voted one hundred and twenty- 
five pounds. Newport contributed a thousand dollars. New York 
sent a New- Year's gift of one thousand and sixty-two pounds, with 
notice of more to come. Ckibs, fire-companies, and other organiza- 
tions, forwarded sums of money during the winter. Charleston, in 
South Carolina, alleviated tlie winter's cold with three hundred and 
seventy-eight tierces of rice. The church in Salem, just after their 
meeting-house was burnt, and a powerful member had drawn off 
a number of their body, contrived to send twenty-four pounds, six- 
teen shillings, and eight pence, "wishing it had beeii ten times 
more." Little Butland could only spare "four quarters of beef," 
weight five hundred and ninety-three pounds. Springfield gave 
twenty-five pigs, worth " three pounds, eighteen shillings, one penny, 
lawful money." Wells, in Maine, contributed twenty-five cords of 
wood ; Falmouth, fifty-seven cords ; Cape Elizabeth, forty-eight 
cords. Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, voted two hundred pounds. 
From Delaware came nine hundred dollars. In the spring arrived 
another thousand pounds from New York. Farmers who had 
nothing else to give carted firewood, some twelve miles, some six- 
teen. Dominica gave three bags of cocoa. Even from London — 
from the "Constitutional Society " there — came a hundred pounds; 
from another society, called "The Supporters of Civil Eights," came 
five hundred pounds ; and four smaller sums were received from 
individuals in England, — fifteen pounds, twenty pounds, ten pounds, 
four guineas. Augustine Washington, in Virginia, was asked 
whether he could sell a quantity of hoes and axes which Boston 
mechanics, thrown out of employment by the Port Bill, had turned 
to and made. The committee of relief set large numbers of the 
mechanics at work making bricks, nails, fabrics, implements, and 
invited contributions of materials. And so the work went on, even 
after the siege of the town was begun by the Continental troops ; 
Georgia sending sixt^'-three casks of rice as late as June, 1776. 

The letters which accompanied the gift, and the answers of the 



THE EFFECT IN VIRGIOTA AND ELSEWHERE. 133 

Boston Committee, — for every gift was specially acknowledged in 
an epistle of liigli courtesy and considerable length, — would fill a 
volume of some magnitude. They have been printed by the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society, to whicli the public is indebted for the 
preservation and accessibility of a great number of most precious 
memorials of the past. No relic of that period contains so much of 
its spirit as this mass of correspondence. 

Jefferson, on his mountain-top that summer, was busy both with 
hands and brain. He was striving to get a more commodious 
house over tlie heads of his double brood ; making bricks, cutting 
timber, sending to England for sixteen pairs of sashes, and a small 
box of glass to mend with. His new Italian gardeners gave him as 
much work as he gave them ; such an enthusiast in their lovely art 
was he. Nor was he yet, nor was he ever, weaned from his violin. 

Alberti, a great performer on the instrument, who had come to 
Virginia with a troupe of actors, and settled there as a teacher of 
music, he had lured to Monticello. Under him he practised three 
hours a day, until the absorbing events of these times drew him ofip. 

This summer, especially, his head was busier than his hands. 
June and July would soon pass ; and then the burgesses were to 
meet at Williamsburg, in convention, to elect deputies to the Con- 
gress which was to assemble at Philadelphia in September. Those 
deputies, when elected, would require formal, exact instructions. 
What did Virginia desire her deputies to do or attempt in Philadel- 
phia ? It was a grave question. It was a difficult question. The 
situation being unique, there were no precedents to guide ; and how 
necessary to the limited mind of man are precedents ! Jefferson 
brooded over this problem; and before starting for Williamsburg, at 
the end of July, he prepared a draft of such instructions as he 
desired should be given to the representatives of Virginia in the 
General Congress. It was but a rough draft, with gaps in it for 
names and dates, which he could not procure at home. Such as it 
was, however, it made him famous on one side of the ocean, and 
proscribed on the other. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

JEFFERSOX GIVES ADVICE TO GEORGE III. 

The slow pace at whicli the two great revolutions of tlie last cen- 
tury marched surjirises anew every new inquirer. In our own day 
a Louis Philippe slips across the Channel at the imminent risk of 
catching a cold, or a Louis Napoleon eagerly surrenders a sword he 
never used, and finds safety in an enclianting chateau ; and, hehold, 
the revolution is accomplished ! No one misses them. No one 
regrets tliem. They vanish from the scene like player kings, — as 
they are ; and, if a movement is made for their return, it is by men 
who take their wages for doing it. So completely have we outgrown 
that mighty illusion of the past, "the divinity that hedged a king. 

V Mr. Carlyle opens his series of pictures of the French Revolution 
with the death of Louis XV. To have made the series complete, lie 
might have begun with the execution of poor crazy Damiens, who 
pierced the skin of that monarch with a penknife in 1757, and was 
j)ut to death with tortures inconceivable. Nothing could recall to 
the modern reader more forcibly the spell that once surrounded the 

' kingly office. Nothing could better show what the French people 
had to overcome before they could think of a king as the mere chief 
magistrate of a nation, existing only for the nation's convenience. 
The apology and explanation of tlie frenzies of the French Revolu- 
tion was the awful majesty with which policy and religion had con- 
sj)ired to invest the name and person of the monarch. 

It was not merely that the king had the power to inflict upon an 
irresponsible fanatic all the anguish which the frame of a powerful 
young man could endure ; it was not merely that the wretch was 
burned with red-hot tongs by the parasites who arrested him; that 
his eighty-two days of detention and trial were all days of keenest 
suffering ; that the art of torture was exhausted to wring from his 

134 



JEFFERSON GIVES ADVICE TO GEOEGE Til. 135 

lips the names of imaginary confederates; that his right hand was 
slowly burnt off; that he was torn with red-hot pincers, and melted 
lead and boiling pitch poured into his wounds ; that he was pulled 
to pieces by four horses ; that his body was burned to ashes, his 
house levelled with the dust, his iunoceiit family banished, and his 
relations forbidden to bear his name. The cowardice of kings has 
done or permitted such cruelty many times. The, instructive fact in 
this case is, that France, Europe, the civilized world, looked on, 
and saw all that done without disapproval ! The king was hailed 
with unaccustomed, acclamations when next he appeared in public. 
When he pensioned, or otherwise rewarded, every man concerned in 
the trial and execution, from the judged to the torturers, he evidently 
did what France thought wa,s becoming. A dozen diarists of the 
time have left minute narratives of the whole fell business ; but who 
intimates disapproval ? The woman of rank who expressed pity for 
the horses, as she watched their struggles to accomplish their part 
of the programme, was supposed to have uttered a gay, spriglitly 
thing, suited to the occasion. Even Voltaire, the chief opponent 
of the system of torture, made a jest of this victim's agony; for he 
held that torture, thoug'h absurd and monstrous in ordinary cases, 
might properly be employed when the life of a king had been 
aimed at. 

In England and in English colonies, king-w^orship was as much 
more profound and solemn as the character of the Saxon is deeper 
than that of the Celt. How else can we account for the submission 
of such an empire as that of Great Britain to such kings as the 
Four Georges, from whom it derived immense evils, and no good? 
Whoever or whatever, during the last two centuries, has been right 
in England, the king has always been wrong. Whoever has been 
wise in England, the king has always been foolish. Whoever has 
assisted progress in England, the king has always obstructed it. 
During the reign of the first two of these royal Georges, the 
interests of a great empire were made subordinate to those of a petty 
Continental state. The third spent his long life in warring upon 
that in the government of his country which constitutes a great 
part of Britain's claim to the gratitude of our race. The fourth, so 
far as the finite mind of man can discern, lived but to show how 
nearly a man can resemble a brute, without undergoing an Ovid's 
metamorphosis, and falling upon four legs. 



136 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

But, being called by the name of king, it was enough. From 
imperial Chatham, through all gradations of intelligence and 
power, down, past Dr. Johnson, to the lowest flunky that ever aired 
his " quivering calves " behind a carriage. Englishmen were proud 
to be called their subjects, and could not hold their souls upright in 
their presence. This is one of the mysteries of human nature for 
some future Darwin to investigate; for it is something which we 
appear to have in common with the bees, the ants, some migratory 
birds, and some gregarious beasts. 

Jeiferson had one of the most radical of minds, superior to the 
illusions in which most men pass their lives ; but when, in the 
summer of 1774, he sat down to prepare a draft of Instructions for 
Virginia's delegates to the Congress, which was to meet at Philadel- 
phia in September, he thought of nothing more revolutionary than 
■Qthis : The Congress should unite in a most solemn and elaborate 
address to the king ! The case had been argued, one would think, 
often enough. For nine years the separate colonies had been peti- 
tioning and resolving. The press of both countries had teemed 
with the subject. Franklin had been elucidating it, and flashing 
wit upon it. If a gracious king did not understand the matter yet, 
there was small reason to hope that any further expenditure of 
mere ink would avail. Nevertheless, this young radical of Monti- 
cello deemed it the chief duty of the Continental Congress to argue 
the matter once more, and make another appeal to the justice of 
the king. The delegates from Virginia, he thought, should be 
instructed to propose to the Congress to present ''a humble and 
dutiful address to His Majesty," as' the chief magistrate of the 
empire, — an empire governed by many legislatures, — informing 
him that one of those legislatures, namely, the British Parliament, 
had encroached upon the rights of others, namely, those of the 
Thirteen American Colonies, and calling upon the king to interfere. 

A humble and dutiful address ! One who is familiar with the 
character of George III. can scarcely read Jefferson's draft of In- 
structions with a serious countenance, so ludicrously remote was it 
from the king's conception of the humble and the dutiful. 

It was a frightfully radical way of opening the case to speak of 
the mighty British Parliament as the legislature of one portion of 
the king's dominions. That was the point in dispute. It is not 
probable, that, in 1774, Thomas Jefferson, a provincial lawyer, knew 



JEFFERSON" GIVES ADVICE TO GEORGE HI. 137 

the secrets of the Court of St. James ; nor could it have been his 
intention to inflame the wrath of the British lion ; but if he had 
known George III. from his childliood, and heard every Tory senti- 
ment which his Scotch tutors had instilled into his unformed mind, 
he could not have produced a piece of writing better calculated to 
exasperate the king. In almost every sentence there was a sting, — • 
the bitter sting of truth and good sense. Jefferson learned, by and 
by, to be a politician ; and he acquired the art of uttering offensiveC 
truths with the minimum of oftence. Just as some noblemen, big- 
oted tories in theory, are most courteous democrats in practice, giving 
to every human creature they know or meet his due of consideration, 
so he, a democrat in theory, became conciliatory and conservative in 
giving utteratice to his opinions, anxious to narrow the breach between 
himself and his opponents. But in this paper he accumulated offence, 
careless of every thing but to get roughly upon paper the substantial 
truth of the matter, leaving it to the convention to invest that truth 
with becoming words. 

The Congress, he thought, should address the king in a frank and 
manly manner, devoid of those servile expressions " which would 
persuade His Majesty that we are asking favors and not rights." 
The king was, to be invited to reflect " that he is no more than the 
chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed 
with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of gov- 
ernment, erected for their use, and, consequently, subject to their 
superintendence." This sentence bluntly asked George III. to un- 
learn his whole education. The king was to be reminded, also, that 
the colonies had been planted, and defended for a hundred and fifty 
J^ears, without costing the king's treasury a shilling. Kecently,. since 
the commerce of America had become important to Great Britain, 
the home government had assisted to expel the French. For the 
same reason England had given aid to Portugal, and other allies, 
commercially important to her ; but the British Parliament did not 
claim, in consequence, a right to tax the Portuguese. 

But this was inoffensive compared with his next point. In allud- 
ing to the oppressions suffered by the colonies in the time of the 
Stuarts, the uncompromising radical held language that no king has 
ever been able to hear with patience : " A family of princes was 
then upon the British throne, whose treasonable crimes against their 
people brought on them afterwards the exertion of those sacred and 



138 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

sovereign rights of punisliment, reserved in the hands of the people 
for cases of extreme necessity, and judged by the constitution unsafe 
to be delegated to any other judicature" ! . He spoke familiarly, too, 
of "the late deposition of His Majesty King Charles, by the 
Commonweath of England," as a thing too obviously right to be 
defended. Equally right was it for some of the colonies to choose to 
reiBaiu under Charles II. It was wholly tlieir business : they could 
have any king they liked, or no king. The people were sovereign ; 
the king was their head servant. 

With regard to the various legislatures in the empire, all of them 
were equally independent and equally sovereign. The parliament 
of Virginia had no right to pass laws for the government of the 
people of England, and the British legislature had no right to pass 
laws for the government of the people of Virginia. Hence, the 
whole series of absurd and iniquitous acts of the British legislature 
regulating the commerce and restricting the industry of the colonies 
were void ! " Can any one reason be assigned, why a hundred and 
sixty thousand electors in the island of Great Britain should give law 
to four millions in the States of America, every individual of whom is 
equal to every individual of them, in virtue, in understanding, and in 
bodily strength ?" He enumerated the long catalogue of monstrous 
acts, from the amazing laws which forbade an American to make a 
hat or a nail, to the malignant tyranny which would drag an accused 
American three thousand miles to his trial. " The cowards who 
would suffer a countrj'man to be torn from the bowels of their soci- 
ety, in order to be thus offered a sacrifice to parliamentary tj'ranny, 
would merit that everlasting infamy now fixed on the authors of 
the act." 

The burden of these instructions is decentralization. Already 
Jefferson saw the necessity of local government, the impossibility of 
a power on the banks of the Thames acting wisely for a Province 
on the shores of the James, the certainty that the momentary inter- 
ests of a class near the law-making power would outweigh the per- 
manent interests of the distant Province. The abolition of slavery, 
he remarked, was " the great object of desire in the colonies ;" and, 
as a step towards that, Virginia had tried again and again to stop 
all farther importations of slaves ; but every such law had been 
vetoed by the king himself, who thus preferred the advantage of "a 
few British corsairs, to the lasting interests of the American States, 



JEFFERSON GIVES ADVICE TO GEOEGE III. 139 

and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous 
practice." 

In asserting that the great object of desire in the colonies was the 
abolition of slav^ery, he expressed rather the feeling of his own set, — O 
the educated and high-bred j'oung Whigs of the Southern colonies, 
than the sentiments of the great body of slaveholders. He could 
boast that the first act of his own public life had been an attempt in 
that direction; and he knew that his friend and ally, Richard Henry :. 
Lee, had opened his brilliant career by a motion to put an end to 
''the iniquitous and disgraceful traffic" in slaves. Virginia, this 
orator observed,'was falling behind younger colonies, because, "with 
their whites, they import arts and agriculture, whilst we, with 
our blacks, exclude both." Every man with whom Jefferson asso- 
ciated felt and spoke in this spirit. Wythe, R. H. Lee, Madison, 
Jefferson, and the flower of the young men of South Carolina, were 
all abolitionists; and all of them used in 1774 the arguments which 
were so familiar to us in 1860. 

Jefferson made a clean breast of it in these Instructions. He 
went to the root of the matter on every topic that he touched. He 
paid the king the extravagant homage of assuming, that, if a thing 
could be shown to be wrong or unlawful, his majesty would refrain 
from doing it, as a matter of course. Hence, in descanting upon 
the odious presence of British troops in Massachusetts, he desired 
the king to be informed that he had "no right to land a single 
armed man upon these shores ; " and that those regiments in Boston 
were subject to the laws of Massachusetts, like all other emi- 
grants ! The king's grandfather, George II., in the Seven Years' 
War, found it convenient to bring over a body of his own Han- 
overian troops to assist in the defence of England ; but he could 
not land a man of them till Parliament had given its consent, 
and specified the precise number that might be brought in. The 
States of America had the same right. "Every State must judge 
for itself the number of armed men which they may safely trust 
among them, of whom they are to consist, and under what restric- 
tions they are to be laid." 

Every State! The word "colonies" seldom occurs in this docu- 
ment. The word "States" supplies its place. 

The wrongs of Boston, when he came to speak upon them, kin- 
dled his visually tranquil mind. He wanted it put to the king with 



140 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

all the force of which language was capable, that, while only a few 
men had been concerned in throwing the tea into the harbor, the 
closing of the port had reduced " an ancient and wealthy town, in a 
moment, frftm opulence to beggary." Men who had spent their 
lives in extending the commerce of the empire, men who were 
absent in distant countries, men who sided with the king, all, all, 
were involved in one indiscriminate ruin. This might be revenge : 
it could not be justice. 

Towards the close of his draft the author dropped the tone of a 
burgess instructing his representative, and talked directly to the 
king himself: "Open your breast, sire, to.liberal and expanded 
thought. Let not the name of George III. be a blot on the page of 
history. . . . iThe whole art of government consists in the art of 
being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give 
you credit when you fail.' No longer persevere in sacrificing the 
rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of an- 
other." With several other brotherly observations equally suited to 
sootlie the mind of a proud, ignorant, obstinate, and misguided king. 

These radical doctrines found free acceptance among the planters 
of Jefferson's own county of Albemarle. At least, Jefferson's 
ascendency was such, that he was able to procure for them the sup- 
port of the freeholders of the county. 

It is interesting to notice that the details of politics were managed 
a hundred years ago very much as they are now. May we not say, 
as they were twenty centuries ago ? Who has forgotten the shock 
of surprise which he experienced upon opening for the first time a 
volume of Demosthenes' speeches, to discover that Whereas and 
Kesolved were forms as familiar to an Athenian audience as they 
are to us ; and that when, on a memorable occasion, Daniel Webster 
called for the reading of the resolution, he practised a device which 
Demosthenes used almost every time he spoke? Thomas Jefferson 
wrote this draft of instructions before he had been chosen a member 
of the convention which was to elect delegates to the Congress. But 
politics had alreadj'' the character which we sometimes describe as 
"cut and dried." He knew he was to be elected. The freeholders 
of Albemarle were to meet on the 26th of July, in order to choose 
two gentlemen to serve them in the double capacity of burgesses 
and members of the Williamsburg Convention. Those two gentle- 
men would also require instructions which should accord with the 



JEFFERSON GIVES ADVICE TO GEORGE IH. 141 

ponderous document that one of tliem intended to carry in his 
pocket to the convention. How could that conformity be better 
secured thaij by employing the same mind to execute both ? In the 
resolutions passed by tlie freeholders of Albemarle, Jefferson caused, 
himself and his colleague to be notified that no foreign legislature 
could rightfully exercise authority in an American colony. This 
was the leading idea of his draught, which Franklin had promul- 
gated seven years before. 

Being duly elected and instructed, he left his home for Williams- 
burg some days before the time appointed for the meeting of the 
Convention. How cold are words to express the tumult of desire 
with which this ardent young radical looked forward to meeting his 
friends on this occasion ! Every thing we have of him belonging to 
this period shows a degree of excitement to which he was little 
accustomed. He knew Avell that Virginia was not yet prej)ared for 
si^ch extreme good sense as he had inserted in the roll of manuscript 
which he carried with him. He had himself held the Franklinian 
theory for several years ; but, as yet, he knew but one other member 
of the House of Burgesses who fully accepted it ; and that was his 
old friend and mentor, George Wythe. There was something re- 
volting to the patriotic pride of Virginians in the doctrine that the 
political tie between Virginia and England was the same as that 
which connected England and Hanover, -r- only a king in common! 
He wished to be promptly on the ground to talk tlie matter over 
with members, and, above all, with Patrick Henry, the idol of the 
people, whose irresistible eloquence alone could reconcile the public 
mind to novel or unwelcome ideas. It would not be the first time 
that Henry's morning speech had conveyed to Virginia the results 
of a conference with Jefferson the evening before. An orator is 
never so potent as when he gives wings to truth which minds more 
patient than his own have evolved. 

But Jefferson was not destined to sit in the Williamsburg Con- 
vention. On the road he was taken sick ; he could not continue his 
journey ; and, for the only time in his life, he was unable to perform 
a public duty from mere bodily inability. The intense mental excite- 
ment under which he had labored, the toil of composing in haste so 
extensive a piece, and the sudden change from the airy height of 
Monticello to the August heats of the lower country, proved too 
much even for his excellent constitution. But an author is strongly 



142 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

attached to the offspring of his brain. He sent forward to Williams- 
burg two copies of his work, one addressed to Peyton Randolph, who 
was to preside over the convention, and the other to Patrick Henry, 
Mr. Henry was an idle, disorderly man of genius, — "the laziest 
man in reading," says Jefferson, " I ever knew." Whether he ever 
read this mass of manuscript (sixty or seventy pages of ordinary 
writing) will never be known ; for nothing was ever heard of the 
copy sent to him. But the chairman, Mr. Randolph, took public 
notice of his copy. He announced to the Convention that he had 
received such a document from a member who was prevented from 
attending by sickness, and he laid it on the table for members to 
read if they chose. Most of them read it, and many approved it, 
though aware of its unsuitableness to the existing state of things. 
Probablj'' not one member would have given it the stamp of his 
official approbation. It occurred to some, however, that it would 
make a timely pamphlet ; and in that form it was published and 
extensively circulated, with this title, "A Summary View of the 
Rights of America." Copies were sent to England. Mr. Burke, 
who saw in it a weapon of offence against the ministry, changed it 
here and there, added sentences, and caused it to be published in 
England, where it ran through edition after edition. It procured 
for the author, to use his own language, " the honor of having his 
name inserted in a long list of proscriptions enrolled in a bill of 
attainder commenced in one of the Houses of Parliament, but sup- 
pressed in embryo by the hasty step of events." The list included 
about twenty names, among which were John Hancock, Samuel 
Adams, John Adams, Peyton Randolph, and Patrick Henry. 

In this pamphlet, the truth concerning both the nature and the 
history of the connection between the colonies and Great Britain — 
the truth, without any reserves whatever — was stated for the first 
time ; and it was so fully stated, that no one was ever able to add 
any thing to it. The Declaration of Independence was only the 
substance of this pamphlet given in a moderate, brief, official form. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE CONGRESS. 

What anguish, wliat humiliation, to be laid aside at such a time 
by a ridiculous summer disease, such as children get from eating 
green apples ! Such is man, high and mighty as he fancies himself 
to be ! It must be owned, however, that the Convention accomplished 
its work exceedingly well without Jefferson. Let us mark well the 
prodigious fact, that Virginia, in 1774, knew how to choose from 
her people, or, as Colonel Washington expressed it, her " ten thou- 
sand taxables," the seven men who best represented her, who could 
best serve her, and reflect most honor upon her. All the colonies 
could do as much. We cannot. It is one of the Lost Arts. These 
seven were all members of the House of Burgesses, and hence were 
familiarly known to the members of the Convention. Mr. Jell'erson 
used to say that every individual of them was chosen for a partic- 
ular reason. *'Ben Harrison," as he styled him, was a jolly, self- 
indulgent, wealthy planter, without much knowledge of principles, 
or capacity for business ; but he perfectly represented his class, long 
the ruling class of the colony, and therefore he was chosen one of 
the deputies. He had at home a son, eighteen months old, who was 
destined to preside over the nation, which the meeting of the Con- 
gress was to create. . Richard Bland was chosen because he was 
considered the best writer in Virginia. Edmund Pendleton was 
regarded in the light of ballast ; since, besides possessing a vast 
fund of legal knowledge, he was prudence personified. Peyton 
Randolph had a genius for presiding over an assembly, — a man of 
weighty presence and imperturbable courtesy. Richard Henry Lee, 
the fluent and ornate orator, was sent to add argument, fact, and 
persuasion to Patrick Henry's awakening peals. Henry himself 
was not selected for his eloquence alone, but also because he was 

143 



14-1 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFPERSOK. 

the man of the people. He was the first eminent American instance 
of a certain combination of qualities that renders a man resistless 
before an unlettered people, — a common mind, uncommon talents, 
and the instinct of being popular. To these six the convention 
added the shining figure of Colonel Washington, now forty-two 
years of age, who united in himself the three possessions that capti- 
vate the greatest number of persons, — military glory, great wealth, 
and a fine person. 

Virginia, I repeat, could choose her seven best and fittest in 
1771; but she could no more have done it then than New York 
^ can do it now, if her grossly ignorant laborers of foreign lineage had 
been admitted to the suffrage. 

Seldom has an assembly so sedulously veiled a radical purpose 
under conservative forms, as this Williamsburg Convention of 
1771. Still protesting " inviolable and unshaken fidelity and attach- 
ment to our most gracious sovereign," still professing regard and 
affection for their friends and fellow-subjects in other parts of the 
empire, still declaring that they opposed every thing which might 
have " the most distant tendency to interrupt or in any wise disturb 
his majesty's jDeace," they nevertheless instructed their delegates, 
that, if that " despotic viceroy," General Gage, should presume to 
attempt to execute his threats against Massachusetts, such conduct 
O would "justify resistance and reprisal." This might be termed a 
conditional declaration of war, and went far be^nd any thing in 
Jefferson's draft of Instructions. The ConveutioiT^lso pledged 
Virginia to a suspension of her business as a tobacco-producing >- 
State, if the home government persisted in its system of oppression. 
No more exportation of produce, no more importation of merchandise ! 
The convention only restrained their deputies in one particular. As 
it was then the first week of August, the tobacco crop was, to use the 
planters' term, "nearly made;" and, what was of more weiglit in 
their honest minds, it was eaten up, spent, pledged to London 
merchants for goods had and consumed. That crop, therefore, must 
go forward. Honor and necessity demanded it. But no more ! 
Unless American grievances were redressed by Aug. 10, 1775, 
not a pound of Virginia tobacco should go to England; and Virginia 
would'find some other way of earning her subsistence. As for tea, 
" we view it with horror ! " From this day, this very 6th of August, 
1774, we will neither import it nor buy it, — no, nor even use the 
little we have on hand ! 



THE CONGRESS. 145 

It is interesting to view the action of this convention in connec- 
tion with Jefferson's paper. He, the philosopher, tiie man of books 
and thoughts, was chiefly concerned to get on paper the correct 
theory of the situation ; but the practical, English-minded men of p 
the convention, who shrank from the theory, had the clearest view 
of what was to be done. If General Gage stirs to carry out his 
proclamations, give him Lexington I Meanwhile, we will retort the 
starvation of Boston upon British merchants and manufacturers! 
Nothing could be better than Jefterson's theory, except tliis exqui- 
site practice ; and it was part of that practice to give the theory 
wings, and so communicate to it the intelligence of both coun- 
tries. 

Colonel Washington, a very practical head, conceived the idea that 
the Congress might desire to know something exact respecting the 
population, commerce, and resources of each colony. If it should 
come to a fight, it would certainly be desirable to know what 
means the central power would have at command. He took care to 
ascertain from George TVythe, Secretary of the House of Burgesses, 
how many men Virginia contained who were subject to taxation. 
Before leaving Williamsburg for Mount Vernon, he sent off a 
despatch to Richard Henry Lee, who had gone home, to ask him to 
lend his aid toward getting from the four custom-houses (one at 
the mouth of each river, York, James, Rappahannock, and Po- 
tomac) a statement of Virginia's annual exports and imports. 

"P.S. If you should travel to Philadelphia by land, I should be 
glad of your company. Mr. Henry is to be at my house on his way, 
Tuesday, the 30th instant." 

In those electric days people were too full of the great business 
in hand to make any record of their feelings; and hence it is only 
trifles recorded by chance that betray how vivid and universal was 
the interest in the subjects the Congress were to discuss. One 
Sunday morning, in this very August, 1774, an obnoxious tool of 
the "ministry went to church in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As 
soon as he entered, a large number of the congregation rose, left 
the building, and weiit home ! An act of this nature, which might 
not mean much in some communities, indicated in New England a 
deep and unchangeable resolve. Journalism was then an infant 
art. Interviewing — its latest acquisition, and one of its best, 
10 



146 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

though liable to abuse — had not yet been borrowed from that 
great, first interviewer, James Boswell. Often, in those primitive 
days, the press could only reveal an intense and general excitement 
by silence. We know, from many sources, that Philadelphia was 
profoundly moved at the gathering of this Congress ; that the whole 
population was astir ; that two continents had followed with atten- 
tive minds those little groups of horsemen making their way through 
the woods from the various colonies to this central city ; that kings, 
courts, ministries, politicians, philosophers, and peoples, in London, 
Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Ferney (capital of 
Voltaire's empire), were speculating upon what might come of this 
• unique proceeding. But, when we look into the Philadelphia news- 
papers of the week, we find tliat they. mentioned, in a quiet para- 
graph of three lines, that " the gentlemen appointed to meet in the 
General Congress are arrived." Nothing more ! Now and then, 
during the session of fifty-two days, some paper presented to the 
Congress was published without comment; but no indication appears 
in the press, either of the unusual nature of the assembly, or of 
the peculiar interest felt in its proceedings, or of the measures it 
discussed. 

The king employed a similar device, it seems; for, when he 
received at length the eloquent and pathetic petition which the 
Congress addressed to him in the name of the colonies, he sent it 
down to Parliament, as Franklin records, among a great heap of 
letters, handbills, newspapers, and pamphlets from America, and it 
■was laid upon the table undistinguished by any recommendation, 
and unnoticed in the royal speech. 

The sick Jefferson, while the deputies to the Congress were mak- 
ing their way to Philadelphia, resumed his journey, as it seems, and 
reached Williamsburg a few days after the Convention adjourned. 
There he performed an important act. The courts had been closed 
throughout Virginia for several months, which left the lawyers little 
to do. The law fixing the fees of the various ofiicers attached to 
the courts having expired by its own limitation, an act renewing the 
fees was pending in the House of Burgesses when Lord Dunmore 
abruptly dismissed the House in May, 1774 ; and hence no courts 
Lad since been held. The people, not unwilling to bring home to 
their governor a sense of the absurd precipitancy of his conduct, 
appear to have submitted with pleasure to the deprivation. Jeffer- 



THE CONGRESS. 147 

son never resumed practice. At tliirty-one, after seven years' success- 
ful exercise of his profession, lie gave up his unfinished business into i 
the hands of his friend and kinsman, Edmund Randolph, and so 
withdrew from the law, as it proved forever. 

His marriage, as we have seen, had doubled his estate, increasing 
the number of his slaves to more tlian eighty ; and the profits of his 
profession had added three thousand acres to his paternal farm. 
There had gathered about him, too, on his mountain-top, including 
his own family, his sister's brood, his mother and brother, his Italian 
gardeners, the mechanics employed on his house, and his overseers, 
a patriarchal household of thirty-four persons. His presence at 
home was peculiarly needed at all times ; for his wife was not one 
of those robust ladies of the Old Dominion who could conduct a plan- 
tation as well as their husbands, and she was generally absorbed in 
nourishing a life more feeble than her own. Ifcwas for such reasons, 
as we may presume, that he now withdrew from a profession that 
compelled him to be long absent from Albemarle. He felt himself 
strong enough to trust his future to glorioles agriculture and the 
manly, homely arts tliat facilitate agriculture. He might build a 
mill for his own and his neighbor's grain ; he might keep a few boys 
at work, making nails for his county; he might convert some of his 
wood into timber, and a little of his clay into bricks; but hence- 
forth, to the end of his days, he derived the greatest part of his 
revenue from the culture of the soil. He was a. farmer, as his 
fathers had been before him. 

At a time when busy and capafbjft men shrink from public office 
with a feeling resembling horror, it niay. be well to note that few 
persons have ever performed public duty at' such a sacrifice of per- 
sonal feeling and private interest as Thomas Jefferson. Even in old 
and highly-organized communities, the head of such a household 
can be ill spared; but in Virginia, in a remote county, in a region 
where trained labor did not exist, and where men of much capacity 
could seldom be hired at all, and never for long^;. where rudest men 
tilled a new soil with rudest implements, and those men were slaves, 
nothing but the master's eye could prevent the ' most reckless waste 
and ruinous mismanagement. Every frontier plantation was, of 
necessity, a little kingdom, in which the master had to furnish the 
whole daily requirement of authority and guidance. If a wood- 
chopper broke a leg or a blood-vessel, it was Jefi'erson who was sum- 



148 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOISr. 

moned ; and, if the baby had the measles, it was Jefferson Tcho must 
prescribe. When the dam gave way, or a wheel-barrow broke down; 
if a shop caught fire, or the lettuce was nipped by the frost ; if the 
cattle got into the wheat, or the small-pox into the negro quarter, 
— it was still the master who had to furnish brain and nerve for the 
emergency. There was never a "period, during his public life, when 
he had not reasons for remaining at home which most men would 
have felt to be sufficient. 

An incident of this period shows the temper of the times and of 
the man. A copy of the non-importation agreement having reached 
him in August, 1774, he wrote to London to countermand the order 
which he had despatched in June for fourteen pairs of sashes ready 
glazed, and a little glass to mend with. Despatched, do I say ? 
Jefferson's way of getting a letter across the ocean at this time had 
nothing in it that could be called despatch. When he had written 
his letter, the next thing was to find some one going into the lower 
country, who would talce the trouble to get it on board a shij) lying 
in one of the rivers, bound for London. A letter could be manj'- a 
long clay reaching salt water by this method. Before his letter had 
been long gone, word came that his sashes were finished, but the 
putt}' was not hard enough yet to brave the perils of the deep. It 
must harden " about a month." Hence the sashes, which were 
ordered on the 1st of June, before the non-importatiou agreement 
had been contemplated, threatened to arrive about Christmas, when 
that agreement had become the main hope of a roused and patriotic 
continent. In these circumstances, he explained the matter to the 
committee in charge of the county where the sashes would be landed, 
and placed them at their disposal. '' As I mean," said he, " to be a 
conscientious observer of the measures generally thought requisite 
for the preservation of our independent rights, so I think myself 
bound to account to my country for any act of mine which might 
wear an appearance of contravening them." 

His own county was to have its committee of safety, elected, as 
in all the counties, by the freeholders, with due form and solemnity; 
for, if the worst came to the worst, the committees of safety would 
wield, during an interregnum, the sovereign power. On New- Year's 
Day, 1775, this groat business was done in Albemarle. A committee 
of fifteen was elected, with Thomas Jefferson at its head. For him, 
two-hundred and eleven votes were cast, which was eleven more than 
any one else received ; one member getting but sixty-four. 



THE CONGRESS. 149 

A public duty of eminent importance called him away from home 
in the early days of the spring of 1775. The Williamsburg Conven- 
tion of August, 1774, which had elected deputies to the first 
Congress, had adjourned to meet March 20, 1775. But not at Wil- 
liamsburg ! Not at the capital of the Old Dominion ! Not under 
the eye of Dunmore, nor within easy reach of the marines of the 
men-of-war that lay in York River. During these years of agita- 
tion, a village had been slowly gathering upon the site of Virginia's 
future capital, — its natural capital, — where the navigation of the 
James is interrupted, about midway between the ocean and the 
mountains, by islands and impassable rapids. Sea-going vessels of 
a hundred and fifty tons can ascend the winding river a hundred 
and fifty miles, as far as those rapids 5 and, above them for two 
hundred miles farther, barges could be poled and towed. Here 
then, at this " carrying-place," was the spot, of all others in Virginia, 
for Virginia's mart, store-house, and counting-room. The banks of 
the river rise here into commanding heights, which afford a site as 
peculiar and picturesque as that of Edinburgh. E-ichmond was still 
but a straggling village, when the Convention met there in March, 
1775 ; and there was only one building in it fit for such ah assem- 
bly, — the parish church of St. John, — which is still standing, little 
changed, surrounded by its spacious, ill-kept churchyard. It shows 
to what a point of excitement the Province had been wrought, that 
a parish church should have been used for such a purpose. 

The Convention sat eight days, — long enough to give an impulse 
to the course of events, and to decide the future career of Thomas 
Jefferson. 

When we read of Patrick Henry's wonderful displays of elo- 
quence, we naturally figure to ourselves a spacious interior and a 
great crowd of rapt listeners. But, in truth, those of his orations 
which quickened or changed the march of events, and the thrill of 
which has been felt in the nerves of four generations, werg all 
delivered in small rooms and to few hearers, nevermore than one 
hundred and fifty. The first thought of the visitor to St. John's 
church in Richmond is : Could it have been here, in this oaken 
chapel of fifty or sixty pews, that Patrick Henry delivered the 
greatest and best known of all his speeches ? Was it here that he 
uttered those words of doom, so unexpected, so unwelcome, " We 
must fight " ? Even here. And the words were spoken in a tone 



150 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

and manner worthy of the men to whom they were addressed, — 
with quiet and profound solemnity. The mere outline of the speech 
which we possess (with here and there a sentence or a phrase of such 
concentrated power that their every syllable is stamped indelibly 
upon the mind) shows that this untaught orator practised all the art 
of Demosthenes, while exhibiting all his genius. How strangely 
proplietic the sentence, " The next gale that sweeps from the North 
will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms" ! These words 
were spoken on the 23d of March, 1775, while the people were joy- 
ously repeating the news that the king had been so good as to 
receive the petition of the Congress. Nothing at the moment fore- 
told the coming conflict, except the intuitive sense of this inspired 
yeoman. 

He carried the Convention with him. It was agreed that Virginia 
should arm; and a committee of thirteen — a magical number 
henceforth — was named to concert a plan. Along with Patrick 
Henry, George Washington, li. H. Lee, Harrison, Pendleton, and 
others, the young member from Albemarle was appointed to serve . 
on this committee. They agreed upon this : The more densely 
peopled counties should enroll, equip, supply, and drill companies of 
infantry ; the other counties should raise troops of horsemen ; all 
should wear the hunting-shirt, which. Colonel Washington told them, 
was the best possible uniform; and all should set about the work 
of preparation at once. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED BY THE ROYAL GOVERNORS, 

On" the last day of the session the Convention performed the act 
which proved momentous to Mr. Jeflferson. Lord Dunmore was 
governing Virginia without the assistance of its legislature ; hut 
the necessities of the Province were such, that it was thought he 
might be induced or compelled to summon it. Peyton Randolph,' 
the speaker of the House of Burgesses, had presided over the delib- 
erations of the Congress ; and it accorded with the spirit and 
custom of that age (as with justice and good sense) never to change 
public servants except for a good reason. Hence it was certain he 
would be elected chairmaii of the next Congress, to meet on the 
lOtli of May. The Convention, not disposed to give a royal govern- 
or any fair occasion to complain, provided for his return to Virginia, 
by voting, that, in case Peyton Randolph should be obliged to leave 
the Congress before its adjournment, Thomas Jefferson should 
supply his place. 

How graciously the king had received the Congress petition, the 
members of this Convention may have learned before they left 
Richmond. Perhaps in the very hour when Patrick Henry was 
warning them not to indulge in the illusions of hope, nor suffer 
themselves to be betrayed b}'- a kiss, Lord Dunmore was penning a 
ridiculous proclamation, which showed the king's antipathy to the 
Congress, and to every thing that emanated from it : " Whereas cer- 
tain persons have j)r6sumed, without his majesty's authority or 
consent, to assembj^s together at Philadelphia," and have called 
another and similar meeting for May next, " I am commanded by 
the king to require, all magistrates and other officers to use their 
utmost endeavors vo prevent any such appointment of deputies, and 
to exhort all perj>ons whatever within this government to desist 

151 



152 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

from such an unjustifiable proceeding as higlily displeasing to liis 
majesty." 

This document provoked derision only. But the governor's next 
act was an act of war, which every man in Virginia felt like a blow. 
In one of the public squares in Williamsburg, in the very middle of 
the town, was the powder-magazine, containing twenty barrels of 
gunpowder, the property of the colony, and part of its usual means 
of defence against the Indians.' This store, always precious, had 
now become an object of intense and even morbid interest. It was 
not merely that the Province was arming, and that every thing 
relating to arms had acquired new value ; but, in times of public com- 
motion, a community maintained by the labor of slaves is haunted 
by a dread of insurrection. Conscience makes cowards of us all. 
O This fear, always latent, had recently become omnipresent in Vir- 
ginia ; and every man shuddered to think of the deluge of mischief 
and horror a rash coward like Dunmore could bring upon the Prov- 
ince, b}'' luring the negroes to his aid with the promise of freedom. 
To Dunmore, too, that powder had become interesting ; for he was 
almost alone in ,a community that looked upon him as the enemy of 
all which they most prized. True, it was a community in which 
regard for law had become an instinct; and he was, if possible, the 
more safe in their midst because he was their enemy. But con- 
science made a coward of him also. He, too, feared the people he 
had wronged, as thej^ feared the people whom they were always 
wronging. 

In the dead of night, April 20, a small party of marines filed 
from " the palace " grounds, followed by a small wagon belonging to 
Dunmore himself, and marched towards the magazine. For some 
time past a patrol of patriotic citizens had guarded the magazine at 
night ; but, as no alarm occurred, they had gone home a little earlier 
every night, until, on this occasion, the streets of Williamsburg were 
silent an hour after midnight. The noble governor had apparently 
been watching for such a chance to steal the public property ; for, 
like General Gage, he wished to disarm his Province in a quiet way. 
That very night. Gage in Boston was reckoning rp the cost of his 
attempt, in British dead and wounded. Dimmoi i had the key of 
the Williamsburg magazine. About three in thi: morning of the 
day after the battle of Lexington, Dunmore's wagon, loaded with 
fifteen half-barrels of Virginia's powder, was driven out of town, 



HOSTILITIES PKECIPITATED. 153 

guarded by marines, and, soon after daylight, was conveyed on 
board of an English man-of-war, that lay in the James River, seven 
miles distant. The rest of the powder, which the ngble lord's 
noble " little wagon " would not hold, was buried, as it seems, in the 
magazine itself. 

In tlie morning, as soon as this puerile act was known, there 
arose a contest, not between the robbed and the robber, but between 
the cool heads and the hot heads of the town. The people filled 
the streets, excited and angry ; tlie patrol resumed their arms, and 
gathered in the public square ; and every thing was ripe for tumult. 
But the elders and chief men of the place, above all others Peyton 
Kandolph, chairman of the Congress, and Mr. Nicholas, the head of 
the bar, moved about among the people, advising moderation and 
order; and, early in the day, a safetj'-valve was found. Williams- 
burg, small as it was, was a city blessed with a mayor, recorder, 
aldermen, and councilmen, who, on great emergencies, met in 
" common hall," and acted as one body. They met on this wild 
day, and agreed to present an humble address to His Excellency, 
the Rigiit Honorable John, Earl of Dunmore, asking him why the 
colony's powder was taken away from its proper repository, and 
asking him to have it brought back. In his reply, this right 
honorable personage lied. He said he had heard of an insurrec- 
tion in a neighboring county, and had thought it best to remove the 
powder to a place of greater safet}'. Having uttered this falsehood, 
he proceeded to show that it toas a falsehood by promising, upon his 
word and honor, that, if the powder should be wanted for an ^insur- 
rection, it should be brought back in half an hour. But the cool 
heads succeeded in dispersing the people, and leaving the town for 
the night in charge of the patrol. 

Dreadful rumors were in the air. The news of the plunder of the 
magazine sped from county to county, inflaming mijids which no 
considerations of abstract tea could reach. He has taken our 
powder, our own powder, bouglit with our money, and stored for our 
common defence ! The dullest mind could feel all the wrong, and 
much of ttie complex indignity, of the act. In the night, too, while 
honest men were asleep ! 

And what tidings were on their way from the North ! Gage, 
also in the dead of night, had sent an armed force to disarm Massa- 
chusetts! Her yeomen had risen upon them, and driven them back 



154 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

again, a chase of thirty miles ; and they had left a dead or wounded 
soldier on every furlong of the road ! This intelligence, following 
so quick upon the news of Dunmore's exploit, startled every one 
into the conviction that the plunder of the magazine and the march 
of Gage's troops were parts of a general scheme to deprive the 
colonies of the means of defence. The newly-formed companies 
seized such arms as they had, and rushed to their several rendez- 
vous without waiting for orders, demanding to be led to the Capitol, 
and recover their stolen powder. Never was a widely-scattered 
community so instantly kindled ; for, before the news of Lexington 
had been in Virginia four days, there were assembled at Fredericks*- 
burg fourteen companies of horsemen ready to march to Williams- 
burg, seventy miles distant. And yet the cool heads triumphed 
once more. A letter from Peyton Randolph arrived in the nick of 
time, informing them that the governor had engaged to. arrange the 
affair of the powder in a manner satisfactory to the colony, and 
entreating the troops to return to their homes. By one majority, in 
a meeting of one hundred and two officers, this advice was accepted, 
and the troopers rode homeward. The Congress was to meet again 
in eleven days. It seemed best not to precipitate the colony into 
war. 

There was a man in Virginia, the King of Virginia we may call 
him, Patrick Henry, who saw in this affair of the powder the best 
opportunity that had yet occurred of bringing home the controversy 
to the minds of the unthinking. " You may talk in vain to them," 
said he to his friends, "about the duties upon tea ; but tell them of 
the robber}- of the magazine, and that the next step will be to dis- 
arm them, and j'ou bring the subject home to their bosoms." He 
called together the horsemen of his county of Hanover, harangued 
them, and began his march toward Williamsburg, joined, as he 
advanced, by squads of other companies, until his band amounted to 
a hundred and fifty men. By the time the news of this movement 
reached the capital, rumor had swelled his force to five thousand 
infuriate patriots, armed to the teeth. Consternation filled the 
palace of the governor. He sent his wife and daughters on board 
the Fowey, man-of-war. The captain of that famous vessel gar- 
risoned the palace with marines, and threatened, in case of an out- 
break, to fire upon the town. Several of Patrick Henry's friends 
rode in hot haste to induce him to turn back ; but he held to his pur- 



HOSTILITIES PEECIPITATED. 155 

pose, until, at the close of the second clay's march, he halted sixteen 
miles from Williamsburg. 

Lord Dunmore, in this extremity, called his Council together, — 
that select body whom the governor himself nominated, and the 
king appointed. Being summoned, they repaired to the Council 
Chamber in the Capitol, their invariable place of meeting ; but the 
governor, panic-stricken, would not venture out, and commanded 
the Council to attend him in the^ palace. When they were seated 
in his presence, he stated the case, and said he was afraid the 
excited troopers who were approaching might, in their frenzy, seize 
upon a public magazine, which would infallibly bring down upon ■ 
the Province the direst vengeance of an insulted king. To ward off 
this fearful peril from Virginia, he suggested that panacea of fall- 
ing governments, a proclamation. The youngest member of this 
Council of seven, and the only Whig among them, was John Page, O 
the college friend of Jefferson, and the confident of his youthful love 
for Belinda. It was he who broke the long and awkward pause that 
followed the governor's address by asking whether, in case the 
Council should agree to advise a proclamation, his Lordship would 
consent to restore the powder. The removal of the powder, con- 
tinued Mr. Page, having caused the present tumult, tranquillity 
would be instantly restored by its restoration. " Mr. Page," ex- 
claimed the governor, with the fury natural to such a brain at the 
reception of advice so simple and so wise, — "Mr. Page, I am 
astonished at you ! " And he brought down his lordly fist upon the 
table with a prodigious thump. To which the young councillor 
quietly replied, that, in giving his opinion, he had done his duty, 
and he had no other advice to give. 

The curtain falls upon this scene. The next morning at sunrise, 
a messenger from the capital sought an interview with Patrick 
Henry in the tavern where he had passed the night. . When the 
messenger ]eft«the tavern, he bore with him a written paper, of 
which the following is a copy : — 

" Doncastle's Ordinary, New Kent, May 4, 1775. Eeceived from 
the Honorable Richard Corbin,Esq., His Majesty's Eeceiver-General, 
330 pounds, as a compensation for the gunpowder lately taken out 
of the public magazine by the governor's order ; which money I 
promise to convey to the Virginia delegates at the General Congress, 



156 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

to be, under their direction, laid out in gunpowder for tlie colony's 
use, and to be stored as they shall direct, until the ne;s:t Colony 
Convention or General Assembly, unless it shall be necessary, in the 
mean time, to use tlie same in defence of the colony. It is agreed, 
that, in case the next Convention shall determine that any part of 
the said money ought to be returned to the said Receiver-General, 
that the same shall be done accordingly, Patrick Heurj'-, juu." * 

Such was Virginia's bloodless Lexington. The volunteers re- 
turned to their homes at once ; and their leader, a few days after, 
set out for the Congress, escorted by a great retinue of horsemen, as 
far as the Potomac River. There was a neatness and finish to this 
triumph that captivated the continent, and made Patrick Henrj' 
inexpressibly dear to Virginia. The Province would liave at once 
resumed its tranquillity, but for the incredible folly of the governor, 
who, totally bereft of sense and judgment, and emboldened by the 
presence of a royal squadron, still kept the peninsula in a broil. 

From the distant summit of Monticello, Jefferson watched the 
course of events with the interest natural to such a person, ever 
longing for a restoration of the ancient harmony and good-will 
between the two countries. Lord Chatham's bill of January, 1775, 
inspired by Franklin, which conceded every thing the colonies 
deemed essential, had given him hope, until the next ship brought 
the tidings of its summary and contemptuous rejection. The news 
of Lexington was fourteen days in reaching Albemarle ; and then it 
arrived loaded with exaggeration, — "five hundred of the king's 
troops slain." In writing, a few days after, to the honored instruct- 
or of his youth, Professor Small, then physician and man of science 
in Birmingham, he spoke of Lexington as an "accident" that had 
" cut off our last hope of reconciliation ; " since " a fi-enzy of revenge 

* The sum rcceivod for the powder proved to be too much. The following is an extract 
from the Journal of the Convention held at Richmond in August, 1775. • 

" It appearing to this Convention, by a receipt of Patrick Henry, Esq., and other testi- 
mony, that it was referred to them at this meeting to determine how much of the three hun- 
dred and thirty pounds which had been received by the Receiver-General, on the 4th of 
May, last, to compensate for the powder taken out of the magazine by the governor's orders, 
should bo restored to the said Receiver-General, RliSOLVKD, as the opinion of this Conven- 
tion, tliat sufficient proof being had of their being only fifteen half-barrels of powder so 
taken by Lord Dunmore's order, that no more money should be retained than one hundred 
and twelve pounds ten shiliings, which we judge fully adequate to the p.ayment of the said 
powder, and that the residue of the said three hundred and thirty pounds ought to be 
returnrd to the s^aid Receiver-General; and it is hereby directed to be paid to him by the 
treasurer of this Colony." 



HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED. 157 

seemed to have seized all ranks of people." We may judge of the 
strength of the tie between the mother-country and the colonies, by 
the fact that so un-English a mind as Jefferson's clung with senti- 
mental fondness to the union long after there was any reasonable 
hope of their preserving it. " My first wish," he still wrote, late in 
1775, "is a restoration of our just rights." His second wish was to 
be able, consistently with honor and duty, to withdraw totally from 
the public stage, and pass the rest of his days in domestic ease and 
tranquillity. He did not claim to possess a disinterested patriotism, 
but avowed that the warmth of his wish for reconciliation with 
England was increased by his intense desire to stay at home. His 
pride as a citizen, too, was involved. He saw, as clearly as the 
imperial-minded Chatham, that Britain's chance of remaining 
imperial lay in America. This truth was hidden from the world 
during England's contest with Bonaparte, because she was able to 
waste in twenty years the revenue of three centuries, keeping a 
thousand ships in commission, and subsidizing a continent. That 
looked imperial, but it teas mer^ reckless waste. The whole world 
now perceives, that, when Great Britain threw her American colonies 
away, she lapsed into insularity ; or, to use Jefferson's words of 
1775, she " returned to her original station in the political scale of 
Europe." With the fond pride natural to the citizen, he desired his 
country to be vast, imposing, and powerful. 

Brooding over Lexington and its consequences, he was startled by 
the intelligence that the contingency which would oblige him to 
become a member of Congress was actually to occur : Lord Dunmore, 
in his panic and distraction, had been induced to summon the House 
of Burgesses. This would recall Peyton Randolph from Philadel- 
phia, and send Thomas Jefferson thither to supply his place. The 
rash insolence of the captains of the king's ships lying in the York 
River having roused the people of the peninsula nearly to the point 
of investing the capital with an armed force, Lord Dunmore called 
together the Council, and asked their advice. Summon the bur- 
gesses, suggested a member. His Lordship, as nsual with him when 
he was well advised, broke into a furious and senseless harangue ; 
and when he had finished, John Page calmly replied to him, point 
by point, his best argument being this : If you deprive the people 
of their usual, legal, constitutional representation, they will resort 
to conventions; which itself is revolution. The whole Council joined 



lo8 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

in this sentiment; and, at length, the governor accepted their advice, 
the writs were issued, and the first of June named as the day of 
meeting. 

Tlie air was highly electric. These rural Virginians had heen 
slow to kindle ; for, until the foolish Dunmore and his naval captains 
had joined hands to threaten and insult them, Virginia's part had. 
been to sympathize with the victims of distant oppression, and resent 
wrongs done to a sister colon3^ But these vessels of war in their 
own rivers were now as maddening to them as Gage's regiments 
were to Massachusetts. How welcome English men-of-war had heen 
in other days, when, under an awning, Virginian beanty had de- 
lighted to tread a spotless quarter-deck, and when at the balls in the 
Apollo no partners could be so agreeable as naval officers, sj)lendid in 
the cumbrous uniform of tlie time ! All that was over forever. 
Williamsburg had ever been most lavish of politeness and hospitality 
to the king's navy ; but, at the mere rumor of Patrick Henry's 
approach, Captain Montagu had threatened to fire, not upon 7^ im, but 
upon the tow)i. In making this tlyeat, the captain, in the language 
of a Williamsburg Committee, ''had discovered the most hellish 
principles that can actuate a human mind; " and they advised the 
people to show him no " other mark of civility besides what common 
decency and absolute necessity require." Captain Montagu was 
cut in ^Villiamsburg by every Whig. 

The 1st of June arrived. It had been a question with distant 
constituencies whether it would be safe for patriotic burgesses to 
venture down into that narrow peninsula, with men-of-war in both 
rivers, and bodies of marines at the beck of a savage governor; 
particularly as some members — Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, 
and Thomas Jefferson — had been menaced with a prosecution for 
treason. A paragraph advised every member to come "prepared as 
an American ; " and, accord inglj'', many members arrived at the 
capital clad in the hunting-shirt, and carrying the rifle, to which 
the}'' had become accustomed in the training-field. Jeffei'son, now a 
member both of the Legislature of Virginia and of the General 
Congress, took Williamsburg on his way to Philadelphia, and there 
^ he met Peyton Eandolph, fresh from the Congress. The speaker 
asked him to delay his journey, and remain for a short time in his 
seat in the House of Burgesses. Lord North's conciliatory proposi- 
tion, as it was called, had been Dunmore's pretext for summoning 



HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED. 159 

tlie House ; and the speaker desired tlie aid of Jefferson's pen in 
drawing up Virginia's answer to the same. 

On Thursday, the 1st of June, for the last time, a royal governor 
and a loyal House of Virginia Burgesses exchanged the elaborate 
civilities usual on the first day of a session. The usual committee 
was appointed to reply to the governor's courteous, conciliatory 
speech. Jefferson was a member of this committee, but he was 
charged to make a separate reply to the part of it which related to 
Lord North's proposition ; and to this important duty he addressed 
himself. The dut}'', indeed,, was doubly important, since the docu- 
ment he was to prepare would not only be the reply of Virginia to 
the ministerial scheme, but it would be America's first response 
to it, as no other colonial legislature had been in session since its 
arrival. 

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, the first days of the 
session, j^assed harmoniously enough. If the House was less hum- 
ble than usual in the tone of its communications with the governor, 
it still protested its unshaken attachment to the king; and there 
seemed a fair prospect of the session proceeding agreeably to its 
close. But, as I have observed, the air was electric. There was a 
revolution in the clouds. On Monday evening several 3'oung men 
went to the magazine in Williamsburg, intending to supply them- 
selves with arms from the few weapons still remaining in the public 
store. Arms, at the moment, were in extreme request, and only he 
was happy who had a good weapon. On opening the door of the 
magazine, a spring-gun was discharged, loaded deep with swan-shot, 
and two of the young men were badly wounded. One of them 
received two balls in his shoulder and another in his wrist ; the other 
had one finger cut off and another shattered. Upon examining the 
magazine, the party discovered that other spring-guns were set in it, 
and that no notice had been written up, warning intruders of the 
danger. The setting of these guns, it was immediately ascertained, 
was Dunmore's work, done by his orders soon after Patrick Henry 
had disbanded his troop. 

The cloud burst. The revolution had come. The Williamsburg O 
companies seized their arms, and rushed to the public squares. The 
indignation of the people at this dastardly act of their governor was 
not lessened by the consideration that the young men had been 
wounded while they were breaking the law. They might have 



160 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

fallen cleatl under the coward fire of those guns; and the insult of 
fighting a patriotic and loyal people with w^eapons iisually employed 
against poachers and trespassers was felt by every person. Curses 
both loud and deep were hurled at the palace and its inmates : and 
though the cool heads again contrived to prevent any thing like a 
breach of the peace, yet, at such a time, no potentate can so wall 
himself in, that the hatred and contempt of the people cannot reach 
f him. The next morning, two hours before the early Jane dawn, the 
governor, his family, his abhorred secretary, and his chief servants, 
all fled in silence from the palace, and were driven ten miles down 
the peninsula to Yorktown, whence they were rowed off to the flag- 
ship of the armed squadron anchored there. He was governor of 
Virginia never again. He had still some savage mischief to do in 
the Province, as a mere marauder; but when, at daybreak on the 
8th of June, Lord Dunmore stepped on the quarter-deck of the king's 
ship, George III. ceased to reign over Virginia. His governor had 
run away. 

The House of Burgesses, with inexhaustible patience and courtesy, 
attempted to woo him back by assuring him that he would be, as he 
ever had been, safe in his palace, and that his residence on board a 
distant ship was in the highest degree inconvenient to them and 
irritating to the people. His reply amounted to this : Let the 
House frankly accept Lord North's proposition, dismiss the militia 
companies, and rescind the non-importation agreement, and he would 
not only return to Williamsburg, but do all in his power to soothe 
the just anger of a gracious king against a rebellious Province. 
Mr. Jefferson, meanwhile, had completed his paper upon Lord 
*'- North's scheme. That scheme merely proposed to let the colonies 
tax themselves for the general expenses of the empire, instead of 
being taxed by Parliament ; Parliament to fix the amount to be 
raised, and to have the spending of the money. Mr. Jefferson's 
answer was courteous, clear, and decided. It was incomparably the 
best paper he had yet drawn, and it was adopted by the House with 
only a few verbal changes; or, as the author expresses it, with "a 
dash of cold water on it here and there, enfeebling it somewhat." 
^' His paper may be summed up in two sentences : 1. The ministerial 
scheme '^ changes the form of oppression, without lightening its 
burden ; " 2. It leaves our other wrongs unredressed. Having 
duly elaborated these points, he closed with a paragraph, which, we 



i 



HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED. 161 

presume, he meant to be tender and conciliatory, but which, we 
know, was the quintessence of exasperation to the king and his 
party, since it referred the subject for " final determination to the 
General Congress now sitting, before whom we shall lay the papers 
your lordship has communicated to us." 

'■'■ For ourselves," he continued, " we have exhausted every mode 
of application which our invention could suggest as proper and 
promising. We have decently remonstrated with Parliament : they 
have added new injuries to the old. We have wearied our king 
with our supplications : he has not deigned to answer us. We have 
appealed to the native honor and justice of the British nation: their 
efforts in our favor have hitherto been ineffectual. What, then, re- 
mains to be done ? That we commit our injuries to the even-handed 
justice of that Joeing who doeth no wrohg, earnestly beseeclting him 
to illuminate the councils and prosper the endeavors of those to 
whom America hath confided her hopes, that, through their wise 
directions, we may again see re-united the blessings of liberty, pros- 
perit}^, and harmony with Great Britain." 

The governor's reply to this eloquent and most reasonable address 
was in these words : " Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses, it is 
with real concern that I can discover nothing in your address that 
I think manifests the smallest inclination to, or will be productive 
of, a reconciliation with the mother-country." 

Jefferson did not wait to learn the governor's opinion. The docu- 
ment which he had composed was accepted by the House, on the 10th 
of June, as Virginia's reply to Lord North's proposition ; and the 
next morning, in a one-horse chaise, with a copy of his address duly 
signed and certified in his pocket, he left Williamsburg for Phila- 
delphia. With the assistance of two led horses to change with, he 
could not average more than twenty-two miles a day; and so im- 
perfectly marked were some parts of the road, that twice he emploj^ed 
a guide. He reached Philadelphia on that memorable 20th of June 
when George Washington received his commission from the Con- 
gress ; and we may be sure, that, before the general slej^t that night, 
Jefferson had communicated to him the substance of Virginia's 
response to the Parliamentary scheme. He could not have let the 
general depart for Massachusetts without informing him that his 
own native Province was at his back. The next morning, before 
taking his seat with the Congress, he could not but have seen Wash- 
11 



162 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

ington review the military companies of Philarlelphia, and then ride 
away on his long journey, accompanied by General Schuyler and 
Charles Lee, and escorted by a Pliiladelphia troop of horsemen. 

Twenty miles from Philadelphia General Washington met a mes- 
senger from the North, spurring forward to bear to Congress the 
news of Bunker Hill. Jefferson heard it before night. He was 
himself the bearer of tidings for which Congress had w^aited with 
solicitude ; but tliis was news to cast into the shade all bloodless 
events. How he gloried in the Yankees ! What a Avarmth of 
affection there was then — and will be again — between Massachu- 
setts and Virginia ! " The adventurous genius and intropiditj' of 
those people is amazing," Jefferson wrote to his brother-in-law, when 
the details of the action were hnowii. They were fitting out, he 
said, liglit vessels, armed, A'ith which they expected to clear the 
coast of "every thing below the size of a ship-of-war." So magnani- 
mous too ! " They are now intent on burning Boston as a hive 
which gives cover to regulars ; and none are more bent on it than 
the very people who come out of it, and whose whole prosperity lies 
there." 

America did not feel it necessary or becoming, in those days, to 
scrimp her public men in the matter of salary. It was not, indeed, 
supposed possible to compensate an eminent public servant by any 
amount of money whatever ; but it was considered proper to facili- 
tate his lahovs so far as money could do it. Virginia allowed her 
representatives in the Continental Congress forty-five shillings a day 
each, and a shilling a mile for their travelling expenses, besides "all 
ferriages," then no small item: and the treasurer was authorized to 
advance a member two hundred pounds, if it would be convenient 
to him, before he left Virginia, the member to refund on his return 
home, if the sum advanced " shall happen to exceed his allowance." 



CHAPTER XIX. 

JEFFERSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 

Sixty gentlemen, in silk stockings and pigtails, sitting in a 
room of no great size in a plain brick building up a narrow alley, 
— such was the Continental Congress ; "the Honorable Congress," 
as its constituents made a point of calling it ; " the General Con- 
gress at Philadelphia," as Lord Chatham styled it, when he told 
an incredulous House of Lords that no body of men had ever sur- 
passed it " in solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom 
of conclusion." The present generation of Philadelphians has seen 
the hall wherein Peyton Randolph presided and Patrick Henry 
spoke, a second-hand furniture sales-room, and none too large for 
the purpose ; while the committee-rooms up stairs, to which 
Franklin and Samuel Adams repaired for consultation, were used 
for a school. The principal apartment must have been well filled 
when all the members were present ; and we may be sure that the 
Society of House Carpenters, to whom the building belonged, did 
not violate the proprieties of the Quaker City so far as to furnish 
it sumptuously. 

The Congress was not an assemblage of aged sires with snowy 
locks and aspect venerable, such as art has represented the Roman 
Senate. Old men could neither have done the work nor borne the 
journeys. Franklin, the oldest member, was seventy-one, though 
still ruddy and vigorous ; and there were two or three others past 
sixty ; but the members generally were in the prime of their years 
and powers, with a good sprinkling of j'oung men among them, 
as there must be in representative bodies which truly represent. 
John Jay was thirty, not too old to be a little vain of the papers 
he drew. Maryland had sent two young men, — Thomas Stone, 
thirty-two, and William Paca, thirty -five. From South Carolina 

163 



164 LIFE OP THO:\IAS JEFFEESOK. 

came eloquent John Rutledge, thirty-six, and his brother, Edward 
Eutledge, twenty-six. Patrick Henry was not quite forty ; John 
Adams, only forty; John Langdon, thirty-five; and Jefferson, 
thirty-two. Nor could the Congress be called a learned body, 
though about one-half of the members had had college and pro- 
fessional training. By various paths these men had made their 
way to the confidence of their fellow-citizens ; and the four powers 
that conjointly govern the world — knowledge, character, talents, 
and wealth — were happily combined, as well in the whole body as 
in some individuals. Franklin had them all. Patrick Henry 
wielded one most brilliant and commanding gift ; and there were 
two or three members, now dropped even from biographical dic- 
tionaries, who fulfilled the definition of " good company " reported 
by Crabb Robinson, — persons who "lived upon their own estates 
and other people's ideas." Some sturdy characters were there, who 
had fought their way from the ranks, like Eoger Sherman of Con- 
necticut, farmer's son, shoemaker's apprentice, store-keeper, sur- 
veyor, lawyer, judge, member of the Congress; or like' John 
Langdon of New Hampshire, another farmer's son, mariner and 
merchant till the British cruisers drove him ashore and to the 
Congress. It was, indeed, a wonderful body of sixty men, that 
could send forth to command its armies one of its own members, 
and retain orators like Lee, Henry, John Adams, and John Rut- 
ledge ; writers of the grade of Dickinson, Jefferson, William Liv- 
ingston, and Jay; lawyers like Sherman, Wilson, and Chase; men 
of business such as Hopkins, Langdon, and Lewis ; a philosopher 
like Franklin ; and such an embodiment of energetic and untiring 
will as Samuel Adams. 

The new member from Virginia was most welcome in the Con- 
gress. Besides being the bearer of encouraging news from home, 
he brought with him a kind of reputation which then gave per- 
haps even more prestige than it does at present, — "a reputa- 
tion," as John Adams records, " for literature, science, and a happy 
talent for composition." Even now a new member of good presence 
and liberal fortune would be regarded as an acquisition to Congress 
and to the capital, concerning whom it should be whispered about, 
that, besides the usual Latin and Greek, he had acquired French, 
Italian, and Spanish, and was going on to learn German, and even 
Gaelic if he could only get the books from Scotland ; a gentleman 



JEFEEESOK IN" THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 165 

of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an 
artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, 
and play the violin. The papers which he had written for the Vir- 
ginia Legislature, one of which he brought with him, and another 
of which had been widely scattered in both countries^ were known 
to members. Moreover he was an accession to the radical side. 
His mind was keeping pace with the march of events. There were O 
orators enough already, and no lack of writers ; but Jefferson came, 
not only surcharged with that spirit which was to carry the country 
through the crisis, but full of the learning of the case, up in his 
Magna Charta, versed in the lore of the lawyers of the Common- 
wealth, and conversant with Virginia precedents. He could only 
take part in conversational debates ; there was neither fluency nor ii 
fire in his public utterances ; but, to quote again the language of 
John Adams, ''he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon o 
committees and in conversation, — not even Samuel Adams was 
more so, — that he soon seized upon my heart." He was a Vir- 
ginian too ; and that was a proud title then, and most dear to the 
people of New England. Massachusetts and Virginia, — Massa- 
chusetts oppressed, and Virginia sympathizing, — that was the 
most obvious fact of the situation. And Virginia had espoused the 
cause of persecuted Boston with so eloquent a tongue, and poured 
supplies into her lap with a hand so bountiful and untiring, and 
brought to her support so respectable a liame and such imposing 
wealth and numbers, and sent men to the Congress of such splen- 
did gifts and various worth, that to be a Virginian was itself an 
honorable distinction. Jefferson, too, united in himself the method 
and plod of a Yankee lawyer with the ease and grace which man 
began to acquire when he first bestrode the horse. 

The greatness of this Congress is shown in its consideration for its 
weakest members. An ordinary parliament is controlled by its 
strongest; but this Congress deliberately allowed itself to be domi- s^j 
nated by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, timidest of gentlemen, 
though a man of ability and worth. He dared not face the crisis. 
'•' Johnny," his mother used to say to him (so reports John Adams), 
"you will be hanged; your estate will be forfeited and confiscated; 
you will leave your excellent wife a widow, and your charming chil- 
dren orphans, beggars, and infamous." And this, too, while the 
excellent wife stood by with confirmatory anguish visible in her 



166 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

countenance. Mr. Adams confesses, that, if his wife and mother 
had held such language, it would have made him the most miserable 
of men, even if it did not render him an apostate. The Congress, 
if it could not regard Mr. Dickinson's scruples as purely disinter- 
ested and patriotic, knew that they were representative, and felt the 
necessity of opposing to the king's insensate obstinacy a united 
front. Hence it was, that, when these lions and lambs sat down 
together, it was a little child that led them ; and, for his sake, they 
committed the sublime imbecility of a second petition to the king. 
It was a wonderful condescension. Ben Harrison expressed the 
feeling of nearly every member when he said, in reply to Dickin- 
son's exulting remark, that there was but one word in the petition 
wdiich he disapproved, and that was the word Congress, " There is 
but one word in the paper, Mr. President, of which I approve, and 
that is the word Congress?' It is only the great who can thus bend 
and accommodate themselves to the scruples of the little. 

Nor was it timidity alone that influenced the excellent ladies of 
Mr. Dickinson's family. It was' sentiment as well. In looking over 
the newspapers of that year, 1775, we gather the impression that 
the ministry endeavored to turn to account the personal popularity 
of the king and queen, which was very great," particularly with 
mothers; for were they not th6 parents of ten children, — the oldest 
thirteen, the youngest a baby in arms? It is not possible for the 
scoffing readers of this generation to conceive of the tender emotions 
awakened in the maternal bosom of 1775 upon reading paragraphs 
in the newspapers describing the family life led at Kevv by the royal 
parents and their numerous brood : how their Majesties rose at six in 
the morning, and devoted the next two hours, which they called their 
own, to Arcadian enjoyment ; how, at eight, the five elder children 
were brought from their several abodes to brealvfast with their illus- 
trious parents. " At nine," as one reporter of the period has it, 
" the younger children attend to lisp or smile their good-morrows ; 
and while the five eldest are closely applying to their tasks, the 
little ones and their nurses pass the whole morning in Richmond 
Gardens. The king and queen frequently amuse themselves with 
sitting in the room while the children dine, and once a week, 
attended hy the whole offspring in pairs, va.di\e the little delightful 
tour of Eichmond Gardens " ! Who but a republican savage could 
resist such a picture ? The same faithful reporter bade a loyal 



JEFFERSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 167 

empire take note that the Prince of Wales, aged thirteen, and the 
Bishop of Osnaburgh, aged twelve, promised to excel the generality 
of mankind as much in learning as in rank, for they were kept at 
their books eight hours a day, and were so fond of their lessons ! 
"All the ten are indeed fine children." 

We observe, also, that there was much petitioning this year, both 
for and against the Americans ; which gave the king opportunities 
to indicate his own sentiments: for, when a petition was presented 
adverse to the royal policy, no notice was taken of it ; but when a 
delegation came to the palace, charged to say that a malignant 
spirit of resistance had gone forth in America, fomented by selfish 
men resolved to rise upon the ruins of their country; or when a 
committee of aldermen gave utterance to the opinion that clemency 
was thrown away upon colonists who raised parricidal hands against 
a parent State to which they owed existence and every blessing; or 
when nine tailors from Tooley Street laid "their lives and fortunes 
at the foot of the throne," for a gracious king to employ in main- 
taining tlie authority of Parliament in every part of the» empire, — 
then the Majesty of Britain unknit its troubled brow, and the news- 
papers were enabled to state that " His Majesty received the address 
very graciously, and the gentlemen of the deputation had the honor 
to kiss His Majesty's Irand." The king's deliberate opinion of the 
troubles in America was that Washington, Patrick Henry, the 
Adamses, Jefferson, Peyton Randolph, John Dickinson, and the 
Congress generally, had entered into " a desperate consjiiracy," to 
Use the language of the royal speech of 1775, for the purpose of 
wresting from him a valuable part of his dominions. All this peti- 
tioning, and all these tender or timid scruples of the Dickinson 
part}^, he thought, were, " meant to amuse " a too confiding British 
people; while the leaders, Dickinson himself being one of them, 
were " preparing for a general revolt." Tlius do the stupid usually 
interpret the wise. 

Mr. Jefferson's talent for composition was called into requisition 
on the fifth day of his attendance. The Congress was extremely 
solicitous concerning the wording of the documents which they 
issued, not because they felt the eyes of the universe to be uj)on 
them, though every thing they published luas printed in all the 
newspapers of Christendom that dared insert it, but because they 
had, in all their formal utterances, to avoid many possible errors, 



168 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

and try for many desirable objects. They were resolyed to remain 
in the right, to be the party sinned against; and they meant to 
make this clearly appear. They had to satisfy English Whigs with- 
out giving a handle to English Tories, and express the feeling of 
Samuel Adams without repelling John Dickinson. They had to 
resist General Gage, without appearing as rebels in the ej^es of 
kings whose countenance and succor might become important to 
them. Hence, nothing was so much valued at the moment, next to 
the art of making saltpetre, as skill in the use of Avritten words. 

On the very day when Jefferson took his seat came the first tid- 
ings of Bunker Hill. How powerless is language to recall the thrill, 
the alarm, the rapture, the apprehension, the triumph, the tumult, 
of those days when the tremendous and incredible details were arriv- 
ing ! One thousand and fiftj'-four of the king's own red-coated 
soldiers dead and wounded ! Thirteen officers, bearing the king's 
commission, killed, and seventy wounded ! The king's general and 
army shut up in Boston, impotent ! The Honorable Congress felt 
it necessary to get upon paper, at once, the correct theory of these 
events, with which the world would soon be ringing; for there had 
never before been such a slaughter as this in British America, — not 
in the bloodiest of the Indian fights, nor when Wolfe completed the 
conquest of Canada on the Plains of Abraham. A committee was 
appointed to draw up a statement of the causes of taking up arms. 
This committee, on June 24, Jefferson's third day in the Congress, 
presented a draft, written by a great orator, John Rutledge. Great 

'"^ orators have not the desk-patience to be great writers. The paper 
not being approved, the committee, two days after, was ordered to 

c try again ; and two gentlemen noted for their writing talent, John 
Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson, were added to the committee. 

The members of this famous Congress, nobly as they acquitted 
themselves of their task, were not exempt from the foibles of human 
nature. Tliey had their little vanities, antipathies, and resentments, 
like the rest of our limited race. 

When the Congress adjoarned that day, the members of tlie com- 

r mittee remained; and Jefferson found himself next to William 
Livingston of New Jersey, a lawyer of about his own age, much 
admired for the sweeping vigor of his written style. Jefferson 
regarded him with particular interest. Among the papers issued by 
the first Congress, the one he had liked^best was the Address to the 



JEFFEKSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 169 

People of Great Britain, the most extensive and complete version 
of the case yet given to the world. Without being particularly well 
written, it was a plain, straightforward piece of work, free from those 
reserves and softenings supposed to be requisite in petitions to the 
king. When the Virginia delegates returned, he had inquired con- 
cerning the authorship of a paper so much to his mind ; and Ben 
Harrison had told him that William Livingston was the author. 
Hence he now turned to Livingston, and urged him to undertake O 
the important and difficult draught committed to them. The member 
from New Jersey excused himself, and proposed the work to Jeffer- 
son. Upon this he renewed his request with such urgency, that 
Livingston was puzzled. " We are as j^et but new acquaintances, 
sir," said the Jerseyman : " why are you so urgent for my doing 
it?" He replied, "Because I have been informed that you drew 
the Address to the People of Great Britain, — a production, certainly, 
of the finest pen in America." Livingston had, indeed, presented 
the paper to the house; but, as it was the composition of John Jay 
of New York, he was compelled to waive the compliment. " On 
that, perhaps, sir," said he, "you may not have been correctly in- 
formed." 

The next morning, as Jefferson himself reports, he discovered that 
Mr. Ja}'- was not disposed to lose the honor of his performance. As 
he was walking about in the hall, before the House had been called 
to order, he observed Mr. Jay leading towards him, " by the button 
of his coat," Mr. E. H. Lee of Virginia. These gentlemen were 
not the best friends. " I understand, sir," said Jay to Jeiierson, 
when he had brought up the Virginia orator, " that this gentleman 
informed you that Mr. Livingston drew the Address to the People 
of Great Britain." Mr. Jefferson set him right on the point ; but 
Jay and Lee remained " ever very hostile to one another." 

It is a relief to catch Mr. John Jay, who comes down to us with 
a reputation for austerest virtue, behaving so much like a sophomore. 
The truth is, however, that at thirty he was a merry gentleman 
enough, who smoked his pipe, loved his jest, could be vain of his 
" composition," and was actually — if the reader can believe it — 
called by his intimate friends Jack ! 

The committee asked the new member from Virginia to try his 
hand at the draught, and put Lexington and Bunker Hill into docu- 
mentary form for general circulation. He did his best, but his 



170 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

O usual ill luck pursued liim. Mr. Dickinson thought the paper "too 
strong." No one, as yet, expected or desired any other ending of 
the controversy than reconciliation with Great Britain on the old 
terms. Why, then, asked Dickinson, make reconciliation more dif- 
ficult by offensive words ? " He was so honest a man," says Mr. 
Jefferson, '' and so able a one, that he was greatly indulged, even by 
those who could not feel his scruples." The committee asked him 

^ to take Mr. Jefferson's draught, which all seem to have approved but 

O Dickinson, and put it into a form he could adopt. The result was a 
much better document for the purpose than either of them alone 
could have prepared; for in nothing that men does is the saying 
truer, than in the preparation of official documents, tliat two heads 
are better than one. Mr. Dickinson restated the course of events, 

6 but appended to his mild version of the facts four and a half para- 
graplis of Jefferson's flowing eloquence, which came in well when the 
document was read in town meetings and at the head of departing 
regiments. But Dickinson's part was not less effective. The very 
awkwardnesses of a piece of writing have convincing power when 
they arise from the struggle of an honest mind to get upon paper 
the exact truth. How effective and affecting some of Mr. Lincoln's 
messages for tliis very reason ! It was not eloquent to describe the 
affair of Lexington as " an unprovoked assault upon the inhabit- 

• ants of the said Province, as appears by the affidavits of a great 
number of persons;" nor was it a fine stroke of rhetoric to speak 
of the battle of Bunker Hill as a butchery of our countrymen (say- 
ing nothing of tlie 1,054 British dead and wounded) ; but Homer 
could not have stated it in a better way to reacli the minds of the 

j plain, scrupulous people of Pennsylvania. The committee and the 
Congress adopted Mr. Dickinson's draught. If the reader will turn 
to the document, he will easily discover the precise point where Dick- 
inson's labored statement ends, and Jefferson's glowing utterance 
begins. 

There is one word of three'letters in Mr. Jefferson's portion, which 
I wonder the cautious Pennsylvanian did not erase. It is the word 
of threat italicized in this passage : " We mean not to dissolve that 
union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and 
which we sincerely wish to see restored. Necessity has not yet 
driven us into that desperate measure, nor induced us to excite any 
other nation to war against them. We have not raised armies with 



JEFFERSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 171 

ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain, and establish- 
ing independent States." These words render the date of the tlocu- 
ment interesting. The attested copy bears date July 6, 1775. If 
John Hancock had found it convenient to sign two days before, he 
would have furnished the orators and historians of future ages with 
a " point " ! A year later he put his name to a document of dif- 
ferent tenor. 

Towards the close of the session, it fell to Jefferson to do for the 
Congress what he had already done for Virginia, — draught an 
answer to Lord North's Conciliatory Proposition. As there w^as no 
Dickinson upon the committee, his draught was approved ; and the 
adoption of this paper was among the last acts of the session. 
August 1, seventy-one days after Jefferson had taken his seat, the 
Congress adjourned. 

Besides participating in the daily unreported debates, he had 
penned two important papers, one of which had been rejected, and 
the other accepted. His presence in the House was his best service 
to the cause. His clear conception of the situation, his knowledge 
of the laws and precedents bearing on the controversy, the native 
fearlessness of his intellect, his curious freedom from some of the 
troublesome foibles of our nature, particularly his indifference as to 
who should have the credit of doing the best thing, provided the 
best thing was done, and a certain conciliatory habit of mind and 
manner, — made him a valuable member of such a body as this ; and 
he was happy, too, in being in a situation where his special gift was 
the one in request. With the good-will of all his colleagues, he set 
out for Virginia, Ben Harrison riding with him in his carriage, and 
the other Virginia delegates not far behind. These Virginians were 
wanted at home. They were \vaited for, and anxiously desired. 

For in the Church of St. John, on the loftiest height of Richmond, 
the Virginia convention had been for several days in session, electing 
colonels to the regiments, examining specimens of saltpetre, preparing 
to frustrate the fell designs of Dunmore, and yet reluctant to go on 
until the arrival of the honorable delegates from Philadelphia. 
Patrick Henry, in grateful remembrance of his powder exploit, was 
elected colonel of the First Regiment. 



CHAPTER XX. 

IN TIKGINIA AGAIN". 

It took the delegates eight days to perform the journey from 
Philadelphia to Eichmond. August 9, in the midst of the morn- 
ing session, four of them, as the Journal records, '* Patrick Henry, 
Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, and Thomas Jefferson, 
Esquires, appeared in convention, and took their seats ; and the gen- 
tlemen appointed to represent their counties, in their necessary 
absence, retired." At once the four gentlemen were added to the 
important committee of the moment, and resumed legislative duty. 
On the 11th arrived another delegate, R. H. Lee, who took his seat. 
And this was the last of the arrivals ; for George Washington was 
on other duty, and was not expected home that summer. 

It was a great day in the Convention, this 11th of August, 
meagre as the record is. Again the Convention was to elect seven 
members to represent the colony in the next Congress, which was 
to meet in September. First, three of the last delegation, no longer 
eligible, — General Washington, Colonel Patrick Henry, and 
Edmund Pendleton, the last named being in infirm health, — were 
solemnly thanked by the chairman, on behalf of the Convention, for 
their services in the Congress. The new soldier and the old lawyer 
becomingly responded ; and then the chairman was " desired to trans- 
mit the thanks of this convention, by letter, to His Excellency 
General Wasliington." These high courtesies performed, the ballot- 
ing began. The result showed that Virginia was well pleased with 
the youngest of her representatives : Peyton Randolph, eighty-nine ; 
*^R. H. Lee. eighty-eight ; Thomas Jefferson, eighty-five ; Benjamin 
Harrison, eighty-three ; Thomas Nelson, sixty-six ; Richard Bland, 
sixty one ; George Wythe, fifty-eight. Thus the delegate, who, a few 
months before, had been sent to the Congress to fill a brief vacancy, 
172 



rS" VIRGINIA AGAIN. 173 

stood now third in the list ; above JTelson, one of the richest men in 
Virginia ; above Harrison, the favorite representative of the plant- 
ing interest; above Wythe, his instructor in the law ; above Bland, 
long regarded as the ablest political writer in Virginia^ now venera- 
ble in years. 

Virginia, we observe, stood by her faithful servants. The fatal 
notion of rotation in office had not yet been evolved. The delegates 
who could no longer serve vmre publicly applauded; those who 
could were re-elected with a near approach to unanimit}^, except in the 
case of Mr. Bland, whose age and infirmities rendered him incapable 
of efficient service. His re-election was probably only another form 
of honorable dismission. Calumnious reports had been circulated of 
late, casting doubt upon the sincerity of his attachment to the great 
cause. The Convention, promptl}' yielding to his demand for an 
investigation, had " considered it their duty to bear to the world 
their testimony, that the said Richard Bland had manifested him- 
self the friend of his country, and uniformly stood forth an able 
asserter of her rights and liberties." Copies of this vindication were 
ordered to be sent to the Congress, and to Arthur Lee, the London 
agent of the Province, in whose suspicious mind the slanders had 
probably originated. The re-election was an additional testimony 
which touched the old man's heart. The next morning he 
rose in the Convention to decline the honor conferred upon him. 
This fresh instance of the approval of the Convention, he said, 
was enough for an old man, almost deprived of sight, whose highest 
ambition had ever been to receive, when he should retire from pub- 
lic life, "the plaudit of his country;" and he begged the Conven- 
tion to appoint " some more fit and able person to supply his place." 
The Convention declared that their thanks were due to Richard 
Bland for his able and faithful service, and that they were induced 
tp accept his resignation only by consideration for his advanced age. 
The old man then rose, and remained standing, while the chairman 
pronounced the thanks of the Convention in fit, impressive words. 
A community is not apt to be ill served that treats' its servants in 
this spirit. 

Impatient for his home, Jefferson obtained leave of absence on 
the fifth day of his attendance in the Convention ; but, before he 
left Richmond, he gave his voice and vote for a measure which 
proved to be the beginning of a revolution in Virginia, of which he 



174 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

was to be the soul and director. Dissenters from the Established 
Chur(3h had, as yet, neither rights nor recognition, and in ordinary- 
times both would have been denied them ; but at such a time as 
this, when the fundamental rights of man become living truths in all 
but the dullest minds, enthusiasm lifts men above the trivialities of 
sectarian difference, and enables them to lay aside sectarian arro- 
gance. August 16, 1775, an address from the Baptists was presented 
to the Convention. Of this, the most numerous body of dissent- 
ers in the colon}'. Rev. John Clay, father of the renowned Kentuck- 
ian, was then an active member; and doubtless his name was 
appended to the document. Differ as we may, said the Ba^itists of 
Virginia in this petition, we are nevertheless members of the same 
community, — a community now menaced with oppression and devas- 
tation ; and " we have considered what part it will be proper for 
us to tahe in the unhappy contest." The result of their deliberations 
was : 1, That, " in some cases, it is lawful to go to war ; " and, 2, 
This was one of the cases. Consequently many of their numbers 
had enlisted, and man}' more desired to enlist, who "had an earnest 
desire their ministers should preach to them during the campaign." 
Their petition was, that four Baptist ministers should be allowed to 
preach to Baptist soldiers, " without molestation or abuse." The 
Convention passed a resolution which both granted the request and 
conceded the principle : — ; 

'^Resolved, That it bean instruction to the commanding officers of 
regiments or troops to be raised, that they permit dissenting clergy- 
men to celebrate divine worship, and to preach to the soldiers, or 
exhort, from time to time, as the various operations of the military 
service may permit, for the ease of such scrupulous consciences as 
may not choose to attend divine service as celebrated by the 
chaplain." 

Thus began religious equalit}'' in Virginia. 

Jefferson lingered another day in the Convention ; perhaps to wit- 
ness the election of a new chairman, R. C. Nicholas, in the place of 
Peyton Randolph, whom ill-health had compelled to withdraw; per- 
haps to cast his vote in favor of his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, 
for the office of major of the First Regiment, of which Patrick 
Henry was colonel ; perhaps to assist in the election of the great 



IN VIRGINIA AGAIN. 175 

committee of safety, a body of eleven men, the ruling power in 
Virginia from the adjournment of the Convention till Diinmore was 
expelled, and a new order of things instituted. The four personages 
of the Convention, who are designated in the brief record as " Mr. 
Richard Heni-y Lee, Mr. Henry, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Jefferson," 
were appointed to count the ballot^ on this high occasion. Jeffer- 
son's old friend, John Page, — styled still " the Honorable," from 
his having been one of Dunmore's Council, — was elected a member 
of the controlling committee. I wonder if, at that stirring time, 
Jefferson and "dear Page" ever found time to recall the happy, 
miserable daj-s, when, both being crossed in love, Jefferson sought 
solace in Ossian and old Coke, and dear Page went home to his 
baronial hall, and paid successful court to another ; which Jefferson 
would not believe till he heard it from Page's own lips, well know- 
ing, that, for his own part, he had done with love forever ! — 

Jefferson, at least, still plaj-ed the A'iolin. A violinist now of 
fifteen years' standing, extremely fond of music, aii indefatigable 
practiser, and inheriting a touch of singular delicacy, he had become 
a superior performer. For journeys he had one of those minute 
violins formerly called kits, with a tiny case, which could be packed 
in a portmanteau, or even carried in a large pocket. Wealthy Vir- 
ginians were late risers in those easy-going, luxurious times : but he 
was always an early riser ; and he found his kit a precious resource 
in the long mornings while he was waiting, at country-houses, for 
the family to come down to breakfast. At night, too, he and his 
kit could whisper together without disturbing the occupants of 
adjacent rooms. If the absorbing political events of the period had 
much interrupted his playing, he now owed to them the acquisition 
of the finest violin, perhaps, in the colonies, upon which he had 
fixed covetous ej'es years before. 

To say that this instrument belonged to John Randolph convej's 
no information ; because there are so many John Randolphs of note 
in Virginia history, that the name has lost its designating power. 
We are obliged to say John Randolph, the king's attorney-genei'al, 
son of Sir John, and brother of Peyton Randolph, speaker. This 
precious violin, brought from a foreign land by its proprietor, could 
not in ordinary times have become the object of vulgar sale ; but the 
attorney-general, feeling doubtless that the best fiddle should prop- 
erly belong to the best fiddler, had entered into a compact, four years 



176 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

before, by which the instrument should fall to Jefferson's possession 
after his own death. An agreement was drawn up in legal form, 
signed and sealed by the parties, attested by seven of their friends, 
most of whom were young members of the bar, George Wythe and 
Patrick Henry among them, and duly recorded in tlie minutes of 
the General Court, to this effect : — 

" It is AGREED between John Randolph and Thomas Jefferson, 
that, in case the said John shall survive the said Thomas, the execu- 
tors of the said Thomas shall deliver to the said John 80 pounds 
sterling of, the books of the said Thomas, to be chosen by the said 
John ; and, in case the said Thomas should survive the said John, 
that the executors of the said John shall deliver to the said Thomas 
the violin which the said John brought with him into Virginia, 
together with all his music composed for the violin." * 

To the merry attestors of this unique document the transaction 
may have seemed a joke ; but to Jefferson himself it was so serious, 
that he provided for the fulfilment of the compact in his will, and 
bequeathed a hundred pounds to " the said John " besides. 

This paper was drawn in the piping times of peace, when, as yet, 
Jefferson was " Tom " to his familiars, and Patrick Henry was mas- 
ter of the Christmas revels ; the whole part}'' unknown beyond their 
native Province. But now the times were out of joint. John Ran- 
dolj^h, like most men who held places under the crown, sided with 
the king so far as to think it his duty to leave the country, and, 
before leaving, sold his exquisite violin to Jefferson for thirteen 
pounds. This important bargain was concluded on this last day of 
his attendance in the Convention, and he carried the instrument 
home with liim to Monticello, where it remained a precious posses- 
sion for fifty-one years. 

Short, indeed, was the vacation he now enjoyed, though it was 
longer than he meant it to be. August 19, he reached Monticello; 
Congress was to meet at Philadelphia September 5 ; leaving him 
ten days to stay on his mountain-top, where he had a house 
enlarging, a family of thirty-four whites and eighty-three blacks 
to think for, half a dozen farms to superintend, and a highly 

* Abbreviated from 1 Randall, 131. 



I 



IN VIKGINIA AGAIN. 177 

complicated and extensive garden to overlook. Probablj'' he did not, 
on tliis occasion, much enjoy his new violin. A few days after reach- 
ing home, however, he played upon its late proprietor by writing 
him a letter upon public aftairs, which seems to have been designed 
to be shown in England, to aid in the correction of errors prevalent 
there. Like many other Americans, JeiFerson was puzzled to ac- 
count for the wonderfully absurd conduct of the home government. 
What could possess rational beings, that they should go on, year 
after year, repelling, alienating, the most valuable and loyal colonies 
a nation had ever had, — colonies that cost nothing, never had coat 
any thing, and poured into the mother-country a clear revenue esti- 
mated at two millions sterling a year ; which enriched seaport 
towns, nourished manufactures, and covered the land with new 
wealth ? It must be ignorance, he thought : the ministry had been 
deceived by their servants on this side of the Atlantic. But why 
the American governors and other official persons should want to 
deceive their employers, he declared, was a mystery to him. Why 
should they keep writing home that the American opposition was a 
mere faction, when they knew it was the whole brain and heart of 
the country ? Without attempting to solve this enigma, he seized 
the occasion of the attorney-general's departure to write a letter 
which might assist individuals in England to arrive at the truth 
respecting America. 

When he had finished his statement, he told his Tory friend, that 
though he still preferred a just union with Britain to independence, 
yet, rather than submit to the claims of Parliament, he would lend 
his hand to sink the island of Great Britain in the ocean. He 
added a prophecy» which has been fulfilled: " Whether Britain shall 
continue the head of the greatest empire on earth, or shall return 
to her original station in the political scale of Europe, depends, per- 
haps, on the resolutions of the succeeding winter." Happily for us, 
for the world, and for herself, Britain has returned to her original 
station in the political scale of Europe, and assists the progress of 
the human race in a nobler way by her Earradays, Spencers, Hux- 
leys, Buckles, Mills, Darwins, and George Eliots. 

The day named for the meeting of the Congress found the family 
at Monticello anxious for the preservation of a flickering life, pre- 
cious to them all. Jefferson's eldest child, Martha, was now three 
years old. His second, Jane, aged seventeen months, died in this 

12 



178 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON." 

montli of September, 1775. Detained from his seat by this event, 
he made such haste, wheu at last he did set out, that he performed 
the journey from Monticello.to Philadelphia in six days, arriving 
September 25. This was a feat that must have tasked both liorses 
and rider severely; for the distance in a straight line appears 
to exceed two hundred and fifty miles, and much of the road was 
little more than a " blazed " path through the wilderness. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

THE DECLABATION OF INDEPENDEIfCE. 

He might as well have travelled leisurely ; for, when he reached 
Philadelphia, the great news from England, for which Congress and 
the country were waiting with extreme anxiety, had not arrived; 
and nothing decisive could be intelligently considered until it did. 
The midsummer ships had carried to England the news of Bunker 
Hill, with that incongruous accompaniment, Mr. Dickinson's Second 
Petition to the king. How could Congress have doubted what the 
response would be ? At the beginning of a war, it is bloodshed that 
takes the controversy out of the domain of reason, and consigns it to 
that of mania. Before he had been many days in his seat, he had 
to send news to his brother-in-law. Major Eppes, that the ministry 
were going to push the war with all the might of tlie British 
Empire. The Tower of London was despoiled of its cannon for use 
against the rebellious colonies ; two thousand troops were just 
embarking in Ireland; ten thousand more were to come in the 
spring; most of the garrison of Gibraltar, to be replaced by 
Hessians, were to swell the army of General Gage. And there was 
a piece of news still more alarming to Virginians : a fleet of frigates 
and small vessels, which Dunmore had expressly and most earnestly 
asked for, was coming to lay waste the plantations on the Virginia 
rivers. Soon arrived intelligence of Lord Dartmouth's reply to the 
agent who had delivered into his hands the absurd Second Petition : 
" No answer will be given." The curiously perverse king's speech 
to Parliament was not long behind; in which His Majesty afforded 
Colonel Barre a text for an oration which tlie boys of three genera- 
tions have been well pleased to declaim. The king was so unfortu- 
nate as to speak of the colonies as having been "planted with 
great industry " by the mother country, " nursed with great tender- 

179 



180 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

nesSj encouraged with many commercial advantages, and protected 
and defended at much expense of hlood and treasure." Colonel 
Barre's reply is remarkable for this : it is one of the most eloquent 
passages ever spoken, and it is, at the same time, a perfectly 
unexaggerated statement of facts. The king added to the many 
other politic and conciliatory passages of his speech a delightful 
offer of " tenderness and mercy " to the " unhappy and deluded 
multitude " as soon as they should become " sensible of their error." 
The worst of the news from England was, that the people, wounded 
in their pride by the slaughter at Bunker Hill, were supporting the 
government with enthusiasm and seeming unanimity. 

Jefferson was no longer so much puzzled to account for the 
conduct of the ministr3\ He began to get that insight into the 
nature of personal government — "the folly of heaping importance 
upon idiots " — which became, in later years, so clear and vivid. 
And yet with what strange pertinacity his radical nature clung to 
the connection with Great Britain ! As late as November 29, 1775, 
he could write to his kinsman, John Randolph, that there was not 
a man in the British Empire who more cordially loved a union with 
Great Britain than he did ! Love it as he might, he had probably 
ceased to think it possible. " It is an immense misfortune to the 
whole empire," he wrote, "to have such a king at such a time. We 
are told, and every thing proves it true, that he is the bitterest 
enemy we, have. His minister is able, and that satisfies me that 
ignorance or wickedness somewhere controls him." The last remark 
is interesting, as showing that Jefferson, at a time when the fact 
was not generally known, felt that a man of the calibre of Lord 
North was out of place in the Cabinet of George III., and did not 
in his heart approve the king's policy. " To undo his empire," 
Jefferson continued, "the king has but one more truth to learn, — 
that, after colonies have drawn the sword, there is but one more step 
they can take ! " 

This autumn of 1775 was a period of intense excitement. All 
America was drilling, the Philadelphia companies twice a day. 
Everybody with a tincture of science in his composition was brood- 
ing over the ingredients of gunpowder, and discussing with kindred 
spirits the great saltpetre problem. No day passed without some- 
thing of deep interest coming up in the Congress. When there was 
no news from England to consider, the army around Boston, its 



THE DECLAKATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 181 

destitution, its dwindling numbers, its defective organization, was an 
ever-present topic. Once more it was proved that militia are inca- 
pable of prolonged service in the field, and are useless except to hold 
important points while a proper army is forming. Bull Kun was 
inexcusable ; for we ought not to have been so ignorant or unmindful 
of General Washington's reiterated and most emphatic warnings 
on this point as to have hurled a miscellaneous multitude of citizens 
in soldier-clothes against a fortified position. 

How curiously ignorant were those peaceful colonists of the art 
of war ! Philadelphia seems to have confided implicitly in Dr. 
Franklin's row-gallej^s and marine chevaux-de-frise as a defence 
against the British fleet. Jefferson, doubtless, was one of the con- 
gressional party who went down the river to inspect them, when 
seven of the galleys were paraded, and performed their evolutions. 
The names of the galleys, as John Adams records, were the 
Wasliington, the Effingham, the Dickinson, the Franklin, the Otter, 
the Bull-dog, and "one more which I have forgot." Mr. Jefferson, 
it is to be hoped, went in the Bull-dog with Mr. Adams ; for in 
that vessel were two gentlemen whom he would have found interest- 
ing. One was Mr. Hillegas, treasiirer to Congress, " a great musician," 
says Adams, " talks perpetually of the forte and piano, of Handel, 
and songs and tunes." And besides, " he plays upon the fiddle." 
The other was the famous Rittenhouse, who, Mr. Adams informs us, 
was a mechanic, a mathematician, a philosopher, an astronomer; "a 
tall, slender man, plain, soft, modest, no remarkable depth or 
thoughtfulness in his face, yet cool, attentive, and clear." Then 
there was Mr. Owen Biddle, another member of the Philosophical 
Society. A delightful day Mr. Jefferson would have had upon the 
broad and placid Delaware with such companions ; to say nothing 
of the galleys, and the vaisseaux-de-frise, and Dr. Franklin's 
explanations of the same. If some gentleman questioned the efficacy 
of the galleys, all seemed convinced that the chevaux-de-frise (three 
rows of heavy timber, barbed with iron, anchored to the bottom of 
the river) would puzzle a British admiral extremely. Perhaps they 
did. Nevertheless, before 'two years were past, a British fleet lay at 
anchor off Philadelphia, in a line nearly two miles long. 

In the midst of all this bustle, excitement, and alarm, Congress 
sat with closed doors, no reporter present ; and Jefferson sat with 
them, serving laboriously on committees, and doing his part. Merely 



182 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOX. 

to be present in the Congress, when he had at his distant home an 
infirm mother, a sickly and most tenderly-beloved wife, a little child, 
and a great brood of dependent relatives, cost him the most painful 
self-sacrifice. It was only by chance that he could get a letter from 
or to his mountain-top. When he had been seven weeks away from 
home, he had still to write, " I have never received the scrip of a 
pen from any mortal in Virginia since I left it, nor been able by any 
inquiries I could make to hear of my family." The suspense in 
which he lived was "too terrible to be endured." "If any thing 
has happened," he added, " for God's sake let me know it." 

It fell to his lot, tliis N'ovember, 1775, to witness the beginning 
of the long connection between France and America, which was 
destined to control, not' the destinies of his country only, but his 
own career as a jjublic man. That ''French influence," according 
to the report of ]\Ir. John Jay, to whom we owe our knowledge of 
it, had an almost ludicrous beginning. The scene, indeed, would be 
effective in a comedy. No sooner had the tidings arrived of the 
rejection of the Second Petition, than Congress began to receive 
mysterious notifications that there was a fokeigner in Philadelphia 
who desired to make to them an important and confidential com- 
munication. When this intimation had been several times repeated, 
Congress condescended to name a committee, Mr. Jay, Dr. Franklin, 
and Mr. Jefferson, to receive the message. At the appointed hour, 
in a committee-room of Carpenters' Hall, this distinguished commit- 
tee met the stranger, " an elderly lame man," as Mr. Jay describes 
him, " having the appearance of an old, wounded French ofiicer." 
After preliminary civilities, the lame unknown delivered his commu- 
nication. The king of France, he said, had heard with pleasure of 
the exertions made by the colonies in defence of their rights, wished 
them success, and would manifest his friendship for them openly 
whenever it should become necessary. The committee, of course, 
asked him what authority he had for making these assurances ; but 
the old gentleman only answered by drawing his hand across his 
throat, and saying, " Gentlemen, I shall take care of my head." 
The committee inquired what proofs of friendship the Congress might 
expect from the king. "Gentlemen," was the reply, "if you want 
arms, you shall have them ; if you want ammunition, you shall have 
it ; if you want money, you shall have it." 

This would have been comforting if the stranger would only have 



THE DECLAEATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 183 

exhibited something in the way of credentials. The committee said 
as much ; but no response could be obtained except, " Gentlemen, I 
shall take care of my head." The interview terminated ; and, to use 
the romantic language of Mr. Jay, "he was seen in Philadelphia no 
more." His bearing and appearance, however, gained for him some 
credit ; for Congress speedily appointed that ever-memorable secret 
committee to correspond with.the friends of America in foreign lands, 
which had such momentous consequences. The mysterious stranger 
was indeed an emissary from the French government, — his name 
De Bonvouloir, — an old courtier of noble lineage, who had been in 
America last year at the outbreak of the Revolution. He could, 
indeed, show no credentials, for his instructions were verbal. His 
duty in America was three-fold : 1, To get exact information ; 2, To 
convey warm assurances of sympathy; 3, To assure the Congress 
that they were quite welcome to get Canada if they could, for the 
French had ceased to think of it. On his return to France, he told 
the minister that the Americans were practically unanimous, and 
his report produced as important effects there as his presence had 
here. 

As the winter drew on, it became distressing beyond measure for 
a Virginian with a large household to be absent from home. The 
Province was filled with alarm. A struggle was in progress between 
Dunmore and the Convention for the possession of the slaves ; the 
governor proclaiming freedom to all of them who would join him ; 
and the Convention threatening all who did join him with severest 
punishment. The Convention triumphed in this contest ; but the 
mere attempt to seduce the slaves carried terror to hundreds of those 
isolated Virginia homes, the guardians of which were absent in camp, 
in Convention, and in Congress. The plantations then were almost 
all open to the ravages of a naval force, as every considerable plan- 
tation was of necessity within reach of a navigable stream, by which 
also the negroes could easily escape to Dunmore's head-quarters. It 
seems, from the Journal of the Convention, that only twenty-nine 
slaves joined Dunmore ; namely, Ishmael, Africa, Europe, Romeo, 
Tawley, Cato, Derry, Cuif, Jasper, Luke, and several Toms, Dicks, 
and Harrys, who were ordered to be sold into exile in the West 
Indies or at Honduras. 

Dunmore was successful in nothing except alarming the timid, and 
exasperating the brave. Even his blockade of Hampton Roads did 



184 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

not prevent the Virginia " cruisers " in December from making the 
timely and precious capture of fifty-six hundred bushels of salt. 
Salt was getting very scarce in the Province; owing, as the Journal 
of the Convention assures us, " to the many illegal seizures of vessels 
laden with that article by his majesty's ships of war, and sundry 
piratical vessels fitted out by Lord Dunmore." Having obtained 
this salt, the Convention disposed of it in a singularly wise and just 
manner. It was divided among all the counties of the Province, 
according to their population, and consigned to the several commit- 
tees of safety, to be sold to the families most in need of salt at five 
shillings a bushel ; and, if it should be found that tlie captured salt 
belonged to persons "not inimical to this colony," it was to be paid 
for at the rate of four shillings a bushel. It was a scant supply, 
divided among thirty-one counties. Warwick County's sliare was 
only fourteen busliels, and populous Botetourt's but two hundred and 
ninety-seven. Mrs. Jefferson, perhaps, got a little ; for Albemarle 
was assigned a hundred and forty-four bushels. 

In all the proceedings of Virginia's little parliament, we find a 
most happy blending of courtesy, good sense, and rectitude. In the 
midst of Dunmore's savage aud stupid war against the Province 
(only a few daj^s before it culminated in the infernal bombardment 
and burning of Norfolk), a British frigate arrived in the E-oads with 
a crew of four hundred men. The captain of this vessel, with an 
effrontery seldom paralleled, sent a flag on shore to ask leave to take 
in a supply of fresh provisions; averring that he had no wish "to 
shed the blood of the innocent and helpless," but, if his men " should 
break loose in the uncontrollable pursuit of fresh and wholesome 
nourishment, the result must be obvious to every one." The reply 
of the Convention was politeness itself They desired the captain 
to be informed that they were sensible of the hardship which many 
innocent people on board the frigate were suffering from the want 
of fresh provisions, and that nothing could prevent their permitting 
a supply but patriotic duty. The captain, they continued, was prob- 
ably a stranger in Virginia; and hence they wished him to be 
further informed that "this country hath ever, till of late, considered 
the officers and men of his majesty's navy as their friends, and have 
always had great pleasure in showing them every hospitality and 
civility; but many very recent and unwarrantable instances of the 
hostile behavior of some of the navy towards our inhabitants justify 



THE DECLAEATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 185 

us in suspicions which we would not otherwise entertain. Who are 
the ' iunccent and helpless ' whose blood Captain Bellew would not 
wish to shed, we cannot from his expressions determine ; hut they 
carry with them the strongest implication, that the elTusion of the 
blood of some of our countrymen is the object of his voyage to this 
country." If, however, Captain Bellew would condescend to satisfy 
them that he had come to Virginia on a friendly errand, the Con- 
vention would take every opportunity to pay proper respect to a gen- 
tleman in his station, and use every means in their power to render 
his stay as agreeable as possible. But if, on the contrary. Captain 
Bellew's design was to further the views of our enemies, " he must 
excuse the inhabitants of Virginia, if they totally decline contribut- 
ing towards their own destruction." 

Three days after — January 1, 1776 — Norfolk, the richest and 
most populous city in Virginia, was bombarded, set on fire, and 
nine-tenths of it consumed, — a loss of three hundred thousands 
sterling. Eive thousand people were made homeless and houseless in 
the middle of winter, and those people as innocent of offence as are 
to-day the inhabitants of the most peaceful seaport town on the coast 
of Norway. The Convention, when this intelligence reached them, 
ordered the troops to evacuate the site, and, before doing so, to 
destroy the few houses which had escaped the fire. Norfolk accord- 
ingly was obliterated from the face of the earth. This event, and O 
the burning of Falmouth on the coast of Maine, weaned all hearts 
from an unnatural mother-country. It was not merely the unlet- 
tered portion of the people that were so deeply moved. Franklin's 
old heart was fired. He never forgot Falmouth and Norfolk ; and, 
before he was many months older, he and Paul Jones were concerned 
in those "reprisals," that, for three or four years, kept the coasts of 
Great Britain in alarm, from John O'Groat's House to Land's End. 
Independence never could have been carried in 1776, but for these 
two conflagrations. 

Jefferson heard this maddening news while he was on his way 
home from Philadelphia. Virginia did not require the constant 
attendance of all her seven delegates in Congress, but only of any 
four of them ; and hence they took turns in going home. Nor 
was it desirable, in that critical time, for so many as seven of the 
most influential persons on the popular side to be absent from the 
Province at once. After three months' attendance, therefore, Jeffer- 



186 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

son bade farewell to his colleagues, and passed the rest of tlie winter 
in Virginia, raising further supplies for the people of Boston, collect- 
ing money for the purchase of powder, concerting measures for the 
relief of the inhabitants of Norfolk, entertaining relations and 
friends compelled to abandon their homes in the lower country, and 
preparing the public mind for that "one more step" which colonies 
can take "after they have drawn the sword." What a houseful he 
must have had, with his brother-in-law's family, besides his own 
multitude ! His mother died in March, 1776, aged fifty-five, after 
a widowhood of eighteen years, — an occurrence which may have 
prolonged his absence from Philadelphia. 

The march of events was swift that spring. General Washington 
took Boston, the country read Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," 
and Virginia instructed her delegates to propose independence to 
Congress. 

; May 13, 1776, Jefferson, after an absence of four months and a 
half, resumed his seat in Congress. It was the week when a com- 
mittee of three gentlemen went from house to house in Philadelphia, 
buying old lead for bullets, at sixpence a pound, but excusing fami- 
lies from giving up their clock-weights, because "the iron weights to 
replace them are not yet made." No one was compelled to give up 
his lead ; oh, by no means ! but the public were notified, that, "if any 
persons should be so lost to all sense of the public good as to refuse, 
a list of their names is directed to be returned to the committee of 
safety ! " 

Before Mr. Jefferson had been many days in his place, came the 
intelligence so long waited for, that the Virginia Convention were 
unanimous for independence. A kind of premature Fourth of 
July broke oiit everywhere, as the news spread from town to town. 
First at Williamsburg, where the Convention sat, there were 
"military parades, discharges of artillery, civic dinners, toasts, illu- 
minations ; " and when " the Union flag of America proudly waved 
upon the Capitol, every bosom swelled with generous sentiments 
and heroic confidence." At Philadelphia some gentlemen, as we 
read in the newspapers of the week, made "a handsome collection 
for the purpose of treating the soldiery ; " and there was a grand 
parade on the ground since called Independence Square ; and a 
glorious hoisting of the " Union Flag of the American States " upon 
the Capitol; after which the troops enjoyed the repast provided for 



THE DECLARATIOX OF INDEPENDENCE. 187 

them, and tlie day ended with illuminations. Great Virginia had 
spoken: it was enough. "Every one," said the "Pennsylvania 
Journal" of May 29, "seems pleased that the domination of 
Great Britain is ?io if; at an end!" The newspaper poets kindled 
into song : — 

" Virginia, hail ! Thou venerable State ! 
In arms and council still acknowledged great. 
When lost Britannia in an evil hour 
First tried the steps of arbitrary power, 
Thy foresight then the continent alarmed, 
Thy gallant temper cv'ry bosom warmed." 

Independence was the only topic now. Members of Congress 
still held back, but the feeling out of doors was pressing them to 
take the inevitable step. Mr. Jefferson has recorded a long list of 
the reasons brought forward in debate by the Dickinsonians against 
a final severance of the tie that bound the colonies to Great Britain ; 
but to us these reasons seem mere pretexts for delay. Perhaps the 
true arguments against independence were those given as a bur- 
lesque in one of the radical newspapers : "1, I shall lose my office; 
2, I shall lose the honor of being related to men in office ; 3, I shall 
lose the rent of houses for a year or two ; 4, We shall have np more 
rum, sugar, tea, or coffee, except at a most exorbitant price ; 5, No 
more gauze or fine muslins; 6, The New-England men will ^urn 
Goths and Vandals, and overrun all the Southern colonies ; 7, The 
Church will have no king for a head; 8, The Presbyterians will 
have a share of power in this country; 9, I shall lose my chance of 
a large tract of land in a new purchase ; 10, I shall want the sup- 
port of the first officers of government in my insolence, injustice, and 
viilany ; 11, The common people will have too much power in their 
hands." To this last reason the writer added a note of explanation : 
" N.B. The common people are composed of tradesmen and farmers, 
and include nine-tenths of the people of America." 

It was on the 7th of June that Mr. E.. H. Lee obeyed the instruc- 
tions of the Virginia legislature by moving that Congress should 
declare independence. Two days' debate revealed that the meas- 
ure, though still a little premature, was destined to pass ; and 
therefore the further discussion of the subject was postponed for 
twenty days, and a committee of five was appointed to drauglit a decla- 
ration, — Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Eranklin, John Adams, Roger 



188 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

Sherman, and R. R. Livingston. Mr. Jefferson was naturally 
urged to prepare the draught. He was chairman of the committee, 
having received the highest number of votes ; he was also its 
youngest member, and therefore bound to d6 an ample share of the 
work ; he was noted for his skill with the pen ; he was particularly 
conversant with the points of the controversy ; he was a Virginian. 
The task, indeed, was not very arduous or difficult. Nothing wag 
wanted but a careful and brief recapitulation of wrongs familiar to 
every patriotic mind, and a clear statement of principles hackneyed 
from eleven years' iteration. Jefferson made no difficulty about 
undertaking it, and probably had no anticipation of the vast 
celebrity that was to follow so slight an exercise of his faculties. 

The public seem to have had some intimation of what was trans- 
piring in Congress. On June 11, the day after the committee 
was appointed, and perhaps the very day on which Jefferson began 
to write the draught, he doubtless read in the newspaper of the morn- 
ing that "the grand question of independency" was proposed to two 
thousand Philadelphia volunteers on parade ; when the whole body 
voted for independence, except four officers and twenty-five privates. 
One lieutenant, however, was so much opposed to the proceeding, 
that he refused to put the question ; which " gave great umbrage to 
the men, one of whom replied to him in a genteel and spirited 
manner." Jefferson may have witnessed this scene from his win- 
dow. He lived then in a new brick house out in the fields, near 
what is now the corner of Market and Seventh Streets, a quarter of 
a mile froih Independence Square. " I rented the second floor," he 
tells us, "consisting of a parlor and bedroom, ready furnished," 
rent, thirty-fire shillings a week ; and he wrote this paper in the 
parlor, upon a little writing-desk three inches high, which still 
exists. 

He was ready with his draught in time. His colleagues upon the 
committee suggested a few verbal changes, none of which were im- 
portant ; but, during the three daj^s' discussion of it in the house, 
it was subjected to a review so critical and severe, that the author 
sat in his place silently writhing under it, and Dr. Franklin felt 
called upon to console him with the comic relation of the process by 
which the sign-board of John Thom.pson, hatter, makes and sells 
hats for ready money, was reduced to the name of the hatter and 
the figure of a hat. Young writers know what he suffered, who 



THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 189 

come fresli from the commencement platform to a newspaper office, 
and have their eloquent editorials (equaj to Burke) remorselessly 
edited, their best passages curtailed, their glowing conclusions and 
artful openings cut off, their happy epithets and striking similes 
omitted. Congress made eighteen suppressions, six additions, and 
ten alterations ; and nearly every one of these changes was an im- 
provement. The author, for example, said that men are endowed 
with " inherent and inalienable riglits." Congress struck out 
inherent, — an obvious improvement. He in-tfcftduced his catalogue 
of wrongs by these words: "To prove this, let facts be submitted 
to a candid world, /br tJie truth of which we pledge a faith yet un- 
sullied by falsehood^ It was good taste in Congress to strike out 
the italicized clause; for it was beneath such a body to use language 
of that nature. If gentlemen of the press, who are in secret revolt 
against chiefs insensible to the charms of eloquence, will turn to 
the first volume of Mr. Jefferson's works, and go carefully over the 
passages suppressed or changed in his draught of the Declaration of 
Independence, they may become more reconciled to a process by 
which writers suffer and the public gain. 

That the passage concerning slavery should have been stricken 
out by Congress has often been regretted ; but would it have 
been decent in this body to denounce the king for a crime in the 
guilt of which the colonies had shared ? Mr. Jefferson wrote in his 
draught, — 

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating 
its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant 
people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into 
slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their 
transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of 
IKFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great 
Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be 
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing 
every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable com- 
merce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact 
of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise 
in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has 
"deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded 
them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liber- 



190 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

TiKS of one people, witli crimes wliich he urges them to commit 
against the lives of another." 

Surely the omission of this passage was not less right than wise. 
New-England towns had been enriched by the commerce in slaves, 
and the Southern colonies had subsisted on the labor of slaves for 
a hundred 3'ears. The foolish king had committed errors enough ; 
but it was not fair to hold so limited a person responsible for not 
being a century in advance of his age ; nor was it ever in the 
power of any king to compel his subjects to be slave-ovs^ners. It 
was young Virginia that spoke in this paragraph, — Wythe, Jef- 
ferson, Madison, and their young friends, — not the public mind of 
America, which was destined to reach it, ninety years after, by the 
usual way of agony and blood. 

One omitted passage, perhaps, might have been retained, in which 
Jefferson gave expression to the mighty throb of wounded love 
which American Englishmen suffered when they heard that foreign 
mercenaries had been hired to wage war upon them : — 

" Our British brethren are permitting their chief magistrate to 
send over, not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scottish and 
foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us. These facts have 
given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us 
to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor 
to forget our former love for them, and hold them as we hold the 
rest of minkind, enemies in war, in peace-friends. We might have 
been a free and a great people together ; but a communication of 
grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below tlieir dignity. Ee it so, 
since they will have it. The road to happiness and to glory is open 
to us too. We will tread it apart from them, and acquiesce in the 
necessity which denounces our eternal separation." 

Even this passage, so creditable to the author's feelings, was per- 
haps better suppressed; for, ^ter all, the mother country of Amer- 
ica, as Paine remarked, was not Great Britain, but Europe ; and, 
since the burning of Falmouth and the bombardment of Norfolk, 
such words were not expressive of the feelings of the people. 

The "glittering generality" of the document, "all men are cre- 
ated equal," appears to have been accepted, without objection or 



THE DECLAEATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 191 

remarlr, as a short and simple reprobation of caste and privilege. 
Readers are aware that it has not escaped contemptuous comment in 
recent times. It would have been easy for the author of the Decla- 
ration — and I wish he had done so — to put the statement in 
words which partisan prejudice itself could not have plausibly pre- 
tended to misunderstand ; for, as the passage stands, its most ob- 
vious meaning is not true. 

The noblest utterance of the whole composition is the reason 
given for making the Declaration, — "a decent respect for the 
OPiNioxs OF MANKIND." Thls touches the heart. Among the 
best emotions that human nature knows is the veneration of man ' 
for man. This recognition of the public opinion of the world, — 
! the sum of human sense, — as the final arbiter in all such contro- 
t; versies, is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone, 
perhaps, of all the Congress, would have originated ; and, in point 
of merit, it was worth all the rest. 

During the 2d, 3d, and 4th of July, Congress were engaged 
in reviewing the Declaration. Thursday, the fourth, was a hot 
da}-; the session lasted many hours ; members were tired and im- 
patient. Every one who has watched the sessions of a deliberative 
body knows how the most important measures are retarded, accele- 
rated, even defeated, bj' physical causes of the most trifling nature. 
Mr. Kinglake intimates that Lord Raglan's invasion of the 
Crimea was due rather to the after-dinner slumbers of the British. 
Cabinet, than to any well-considered purpose. Mr. Jefferson used 
to relate, with mucli merriment, that the final signing of the Dec- 
laration of Independence was hastened by an absurdly trivial cause. 
Near the hall in which the debates were then held was a livery- 
stable, from which swarms of flies came into the open windows, and 
assailed the silk-stockinged legs of honorable members. Handker- 
chief in hand, they lashed the flies with such vigor as they could 
command on a July afternoon ; but the annoyance became at length 
so extreme as to render them impatient of delay, and they made 
haste to bring the momentous business to a conclusion. 

After such a long and severe strain upon their minds, members 
seem to have indulged in many a jocular observation as they stood 
around the table. Tradition has it, that when John Hancock had 
affixed his magnificent signature to the paper, he said, " There, 
John Bull may read nvj name without spectacles ! " Tradition, also, 



192 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

will never relinquish the pleasure of repeating, that, when Mr. Han- 
cock reminded members of the necessity of hanging together. Dr. 
Franklin was ready with his, "Yes, we must indeed all hang 

( together, or else, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." 

i And this may have suggested to the portly Harrison — a " luxuri- 
ous, heavy gentleman," as John Adams describes him — his remark 
to slender Eibridge Gerry, that, when the hanging came, he should 
have the advantage ; for poor Gerry would be kicking in the air 
\ long after it was all over with himself. 

^1 French critics censure Shakspeare for mingling huffoonery with 

scenes of the deepest tragic interest. But here we find one of the 
most important assemblies ever convened, at the supreme moment 
of its existence, while performing the act that gives it its rank 
among deliberative bodies, cracking jokes, and hurrying up to the 
table to sign, in order to get away from the flies. It is precisely so 
that Shakspeare would have imagined the scene. 

No composition of man was ever received with more rapture than 
this. It came at a happy time. Boston was delivered, and New 
York, as yet, but menaced ; and in all New England there was not 
a British soldier who was not a prisoner, nor a king's ship that was 
not a prize. Between the expulsion of the British troops from Bos- 
ton, and their capture of New York, was the period of the Rerolu- 
tionary War when the people were most confident and most united. 
From the newspapers and letters of the times, we should infer that 
the contest was ending rather than beginning, so exultant is their 
tone I and the Declaration of Independence, therefore, was received 
more like a song of triumph than a call to battle. 

( The paper was signed late on Thursday afternoon, July 4. On 
the Monday following, at noon, it was publicly read for the first time, 
in Independence Square, from a platform erected by Rittenhouse for 

the purpose of observing the transit of Venus. Captain John Hop- 
kins, a young man commanding an armed brig of the navy of the 
new nation, was the reader ; and it required his stentorian voice to 
carry the words to the distant verge of the multitude who had come to 
hear it. In the evening, as a journal of the day has it, " our late 
king's coat-of-arms were brought from the hall of the State House, 
where the said king's courts were formerly held, and burned amid 
the acclamations of a crowd of spectators." Similar scenes tran- 
spired in every centre of population, and at every camp and post. 



THE DECLAEATIOX OF INDEPENDENCE. 193 

Usually the militia companies, the committee of safety, and other 
revolutionary bodies, marched in procession to some public place, 
where they listened decorously to the reading of the Declaration, at 
the conclusion of which cheers were given and salutes fired ; and, in 
the, evening, there were illuminations and bonfires. In New York, 
after the reading, the leaden statue of the late king in Bowling 
Green was " laid prostrate in the dirt," and ordered to be run into 
bullets. The debtors in prison were also set at liberty. Virginia, 
before the news of the Declaration had reached her (July 5, 177(5), 
had stricken the king's name out of the prayer-book ; and now (July 
30), Rhode Island made it a misdemeanor to pray for the king as 
king, under penalty of a fine of one hujadred thousand pounds ! 

The news of the Declaration was received with sorrow by all that 
was best in England. Samuel Rogers used to give American guests 
at his breakfasts an interesting reminiscence of this period. On the 
morning after the intelligence reached London, his father, at family 
prayers, added a prayer for the success of the colonies, which he 
repeated every day until the peace. 

The deed was done. A people not formed for empire ceased to 
be imperial; and a people destined to empire began the political edu- 
cation that will one day give them far more and better than imperial 
sway. 

Thirteen governments were now to be created, thirteen consti- 
tutions formed, thirteen codes established, even thirteen seals en- 
graved. Heavens ! what a perplexity some of the new governors 
were in about a seal ! No seal, no commission ! Could an ensign 
or lieutenant's commission have the least validity without a dab of 
sealing-wax, with some letters and figures stamped upon it ? Ob- 
viously not. George Wythe and John Page had devised a proper 
seal for Virginia ; but not in all the Province, nor anywhere in 
America south of the Delaware, was there a person who had the 
least idea how to engrave it. " Can you get the work done in Phila- 
delphia ? " writes Page to his old comrade, Jefferson, in this month 
of July. " I^ you can, we must get the favor of you to have it 
done immediately. . . . The engraver may want to know the size. 
This you may determine, unless Mr. "VVytlie should direct the dimen- 
sions. He may also be at a loss for a Virtus and Libertas, but you 
may refer him to Spence's Polj'metis, whicli must be in some library 
in Philadelpliia." The work, however, could not be done there} and 
13 



194 lif:^ of thomas jefferson. 

the legislature was obliged to pass an act empowering the governor 
to issue commissions without a seal, until one could be engraved in 
Europe. The words to be engraved upon this mystic piece of metal, 
words suggested by the gentlest and most benevolent of men, 
George Wythe, acquired a mournful and horrible celebrity in 1865, 
Sic semper Ti/rannis. 

While Jefferson was going about Philadelphia in these burning 
summer daj's looking for an engraver, he was himself brooding over 
a design for a seal; Dr. Franklin, John Adams, and himself having 
been appointed a committee to devise a seal for the central power. 
But Congress, too, had to do without a seal for some years. The 
committee, by combining their ideas, achieved a most elaborate de- 
sign, with the Red Sea in it, and Pharaoh, and a sword, and a pillar, 
and a cloud brilliant with the hidden presence of God. All of their 
suggestions were finally rejected, except the very best legend ever 
appropriated, E Plurihus Unum^ 

Jefferson could not remain in Congress at such a time. Besides 
that the condition of his wife and household now made his presence in 
v^ Virginia, as he said, " indispensably necessary," he had been elected 
to his old seat in the legislature, where duties of the most interest- 
ing nature invited him. Twice he asked to be released, before his 
request was granted and a successor appointed. In September, 1776, 
he left Congress, and went home to assist in adjusting old Virginia 
to the new order of things. 



CHAPTER XXIL 

JEFFEBSON NAMED ENVOY TO FRAXCE. • 

A TEMPTATION crossecT Jefferson's path while the Declaration of 
Independence was still a fresh topic in Christendom. It was a 
temptation which was, and is, of all others, the most alluring to an. 
American who is young, educated, a,nd fond of art ; and it came to 
him in such a guise of public duty, that, if he had yielded to it, only 
one person in the world would have blamed him. But the censure 
of that one would have properly outweighed a world's applause ; for 
it was himself. 

This temptation presented itself on the 8th of October, 1776. He 
had resigned his seat in Congress, and, after spending a few days at 
home, had proceeded to Williamsburg, where he had taken his seat 
in the legislature, and was about to engage in the hard and long 
task of bringing up old Virginia to the level of the age. His heart 
was set on this work. He wanted to help deliver her from the 
bondage of outgrown laws, and introduce some of the institutions 
and usages which had given to New England so conspicuous a supe- 
riority over the Southern Colonies. A Virginian, dining one day 
with John Adams, lamented the inferiority of his State to New 
England. " I can give you," said Mr. Adam%, " a receipt for mak- 
ing a New England in Virginia. V Toivn-meetings, training-days, 
toion-scJiools, and niinisters\; the meeting-house, schoolhouse, and 
training-field are the scenes where New-England men were formed." 
Probably Mr. Jefferson had heard his friend Adams, say something 
of the kind. He was now intent upon purging the Virginia statute- 
books of unsuitable laws, and founding institutions in accord with 
the recent events. 

Young as he was, he had had some training now in practical states- 
manship. That sharp experience in Congress, while his draught of the 

195 



196 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

Declaration of Independence was edited of its crudities, redundancies, 
and imprudences, was salutary to him. It completed the prelim- 
inary part of his education as a public man, — a public man being 
one who has to do, not with what is ideally best, but with the best 
attainable ; not to give eloquent expression to his own ideas, but 
effective expression to the will of his constituents. He wrote little 
that needed severe pruning after July 4, 1776, though he was 
still to propose many things that were unattainable. A truly wise, 
bold, safe, competent public man is one of the slowest formations in 
human nature ; but when formed, there is only one man more pre- 
cious, — the philosopher, who is the common teacher of legislators 
and constituents. If there had been such a philosopher in Virginia 
just then, he would have smiled, perhaps, at the noble enthusiasm 
of these young Virginians, who were about to try to make a New 
England out of a State in which the laboring majority were only 
too likely to remain slaves. 

But it belongs to the generous audacity of youth to attempt the 
impossible. Here at Williamsburg, in this October, 1776, were 
gathered once more the circle of Virginia liberals who had been 
working together against the exactions of the king. Patrick Henry 
was governor now, living in "the palace," and enjoying the old 
viceregal salary of a thousand pounds a year. George Wythe, from 
service in Congress, had acquired experience and distinction. It 
was he who began the constitution-making in which Virginia had 
been engaged during much of this year. In January, while spend- 
ing an evening with Mr. John Adams at Philadelphia, and hearing 
him discourse, in his robust and ancient-Briton manner, of the 
constitution proper for a free State, George Wythe asked him to 
put the substance of his ideas upon paper. Mr. Adams. gave him, 
in consequence, his "'Thoughts upon Government ; " which were 
the best thoughts on that subject of Locke, Milton, Algernon 
Sidney, James Otis, and John Adams. How congenial to Mr. 
Adams such a piece of work ! " The best lawgivers of anti- 
quity," said he,, " would rejoice to live at a period like this, when, 
for the first time in the history of the world, three millions of people 
were deliberately choosing their government and institutions." 
Patrick Henry was well pleased with the " Thoughts." " It shall 
be my incessant study," he wrote to Mr. Adams, " so to form our 
portrait of government, that a kindred with New -England may be 



JEFFERSON NAMED ENVOY TO FRANCE. 197 

discerned in it." So tliought all tlie band of radically-liberal men 
in Virginia, wbo were beginning to regard Thomas Jefferson as 
their chief. 

And now, on the second day of the session, came a fair excuse for 
him to leave the " laboring oar," and throw the difficult task of 
re-creating Virginia upon his colleagues. A messenger from the 
Honorable Congress reached Williamsburg, October 8, bearing a 
despatch for Mr. Jefferson, informing him that he had been elected 
joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent 
the United States at Paris. The temptation was all but irresistible. 
He relished extremely the delicious society of Dr. Franklin, and was 
getting into the Frauklinian way of dealing with cantankerous man. 
Paris, too, to which good Americans were already looking as the 
abode of the blest, where Jefferson could see at last, after living in 
the world thirty-three years, harmoniously porportioned edifices, and 
listen to music such as* the Williainsburg '' Apollo " had only heard 
in dreams. The public duty, also, was supposed to be of the first 
importance. Perhaps it was ; but, also, perhaps it was not. Con- 
sidering the whole case, the j^oung giant might have done better if 
he had, from the first, made up his mind to fight unassisted. It was 
a costly business, that French alliance ; the heaviest item being the 
habit of leaning upon France, and looking for help, at every pinch, 
to the French treasury. But this could not have been foreseen in 
1776 ; and happy, indeed, would it have been for Franklin, for the 
country, for the future, if he could have been seconded by a person 
so formed to co-operate with him as Jefferson. Franklin would have 
got Canada at the peace of 1782, if he had had a Jefferson to help, 
instead of a Jay and an Adams to hinder. 

Torn with contending desires, Jefferson kept the messenger wait- 
ing day after day ; so hard was it to say No to Congress, and to give 
up an appointment promising so much honor and delight. But his 
duty was plain. There was a lady upon Monticello who had a claim 
upon his service with which no other claim could compete. To leave 
her in the condition in which she was, had been infidelity ; and to 
take her with him might have been fatal to her. Virginia had 
many sons, but Mrs. Jefferson had but one husband. So, on the 
11th of October, the messenger mounted and rode away, bearing the 
proper answer to the President of Congress : — 



198 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEES02T. 

" It would argue great insensibility in me, could I receive with 
indiiference so confidential an appointment from your body. My 
tbanks are a poor return for tlife partiality tliey have been pleased to 
entertain for me. No cares for my own person, nor yet for my pri- 
vate affairs, would have induced one moment's hesitation to accept 
the charge. But circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my 
family, such as neither permit me to leave nor to carry it, compel me 
to ask leave to decline a service so honorable, and, at the same time, 
so important to the American cause. The necessity under which I 
labor, and the conflict I have undergone for three days, during which 
I could not determine to dismiss your messenger, will, I hope, plead 
my pardon with Congress ; and I am sure there are too many of that 
body to whom they may with better hopes confide this charge, to 
leave them under a moment's difficulty in making a new choice." 

As soon as he had reached a decision on this important matter, his 
colleagues in the Assembly'', who had been waiting for it, placed him 
on a great number of committees ; and he began forthwith, on the 
very day of the messenger's departure, to introduce the measures of 
reform which he had meditated. Mr. Adams might well regard 
Virginia as a reformer's jjaradise ; for owing to the colonial necessity 
of submitting every desired change to the king, which involved time, 
trouble, expense, and probable rejection, the Province was far behind 
even Great Britain in that adaptation of laws and institutions to 
altered times, which ought to be always in progress in every com- 
munity. There was such an accumulation, in Virginia, of the out- 
grown and the unsuitable, that Jefferson and his friends hoped to 
accomplish in a few months an amount of radical change that would 
have been a fair allowance for a century and a half 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

NEED OF EEFOEM IN OLD VIKGINIA. 

The law-books were full of old absurdity and old cruelty.* Of the 
four hundred thousand people who were supposed to inhabit Virginia, 
one-half were African slaves ; and it was a fixed idea in the Jeffer- 
son circle, that whites and blacks could not live in' equal freedom in 
the same community. Besides the intense prejudice entertained by 
the master race against the servile, and the hatred which had been 
gathering (as Jefferson thought) in the minds of the slaves from 
four generations of outrage, he believed that Nature herself had made 
it impossible for the two races to live happily together on equal terms. 
He evidently had a low opinion of the mental capacity of his colored 
brethren. The Indian, with no opportunities of mental culture 
beyond those of the negro, had acquired the art of oratory, could 
carve the bowl of his pipe into a head not devoid of truth and spirit, 
and draw upon a piece of bark a figure resembling an animal, a plant, 
a tract of country. But never had he observed in a negro, or a 
negro's work, one gleam of superior intelligence, aptitude, or taste. 
No negro standing behind his master's chair had caught from the 
conversation of educated persons an elevated mode of thinking. 
" Never," says Mr. Jefferson, " could I find that a black had uttered 
a thought above the level of plain narration ; never saw even an 
elementary trait of painting or sculpture." In music they were more 
gifted; but no negro had yet imagined any thing bej'oud "a small 

* Like this, for example: "Whereas, oftentimes many brabling women often slander 
and scandalize their neighbors for which tlieir poore husbands are often brought into charge- 
able and vexatous suites, and caste in greatc damages : Bee it therefore enacted by the 
authority aforesaid, that in actions of slander, occasioned bj'the wife as aforesaid, after judg. 
ment passed fur the damages, the woman shall be punished by ducking ; and if the slander 
be soe enormous as to bo adjudged at a greater damage than live hundred pounds of tobacco, 
then the woman to sutter a ducking for every live hundred pounds of tobacco adjudged against 
the husband, if he refuse to pay tlie tobacco." 

199 



200 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

cateli." Love, which inspires the melodious madness of poets, kin- 
dles only the senses of a black man, not his mind, and has never, in 
all the tide of time, wrung from him a word which other lovers love 
to repeat. Mere misery, to other races, has* been inspiration. The 
blacks are wretched enough, but they have never uttered their woes 
in poetry. 

For these and other reasons, Mr. Jefferson was disposed to regard 
the negro race as naturallj'^ inferior ; though he expresses himself on 
the point with the hesitation natural to a scientific mind provided 
with a scant supply of facts. On the political question, he was 
clear : the two races could not live together in peace as equals. The 
attempt to do so, he thought, would " divide Virginians into parties, 
and jiroduce convulsions which would probably never end but in the 
extermination of the one or the other race." Here was a problem for 
a knot of young legislators, without a precedent to guide them in all 
the known history of man ! 

The gross ignorance of the white inhabitants, except one small 
class, was another too obvious fact. They were almost as ignorant 
as Europeans, with fewer restraints than Europeans. Almost every 
glimpse we get of the poorer Virginians of that day is a revelation 
of rude and reckless ignorance. We have in the Memoirs of Elkanah 
Watson, who rode through Virginia in 1778, an election scene at 
Hanover Court House, which must have been a startling contrast to 
the elections he had witnessed in his native Massachusetts, where an 
election was a solemnity opened with prayer. The " whole coun- 
try," he records, was assembled. " The moment I alighted, a 
wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had 
hardly shaken him off when I was attacked by a wild Irishman, 
who insisted on my swapping horses with him, and, in a twinkling, 
ran up the pedigree of his horse to the grand dam. Treating his 
importunity with little respect, I became near being involved in a 
boxing-match, the Irishman swearing I did not ' trate him like a 
jintleman.' I had hardly escaped this dilemma, when xnj attention 
was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foam- • 
ing and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting a 
forefinger in a side-lock of the other's hair, and in the act of thrust- 
ing by this purchase his thumb into the latter's eye, he bawled out, 
King's Cruse, equivalent, in technical language, to Enough." 

There was in Virginia an unusually large proportion of this 



NEED OF KEFOEM IN OLD VIRGINIA. 201 

savage ignorance, easily convertible into fanatical ignorance. The 
handling of tobacco, it appears, gave employment to a great number 
of rough fellows, — tobacco-rollers, among others, who drove a pin 
into each end of a hogshead of tobacco, and thus attaching to it a 
pair of shafts, harnessed a horse to it, and rolled it to the landing. 
Professor Tucker of Virginia speaks of this class as " hardy, reckless, 
proverbially rude, and often indulging in coarse humor at the expense 
of the traveller who chanced to be well dressed, or riding in a car- 
riage." But ignorance was almost universal in Virginia, as it must 
be in every community, unless there is a universal system of educa- 
tion. And this tvas another problem for the young gentlemen at 
Williamsburg who desired to Yankeefy Virginia. Mr. Jefferson, for 
one, felt the absolute necessity of the voting class being able to vote. 
He saw, too, wherever he looked in Virginia, the evils arising 
from ill-distributed wealth. It is the nature of wealth to get into 
heaps ; because it is the nature of the weak to squander their money, 
and of the strong to husband it; and this being its nature, laws 
need not aggravate the tendency. But in Virginia, as in all the 
old-fashioned countries, there was a whole system of laws and 
usages expressly designed to keep property from being distributed. 
Fathers could prevent a profligate son from sinking to his natural level 
in the community, by entailing upon him and upon the first-born of 
his male descendants, not his landed estates only, but the negroes 
who gave them value ; and this entail could only be broken by a 
special act of the legislature. The law of primogeniture prevented 
the natural division of estates among all the family of a deceased 
proprietor, excluding all the daughters, and all the sons but one. 
The consequence was, that the best portions of Virginia were held 
by a few families, who suffered the ills and inconveniences of aristo- 
cratic rank, without attaining that moral elevation which is possible 
to aristocrats who accept the public duties of their position. They 
monopolized the honors of the colony ; but, as a class, they appear to 
have been as destitute of public spirit as the grandees of Spain or 
Poland. There is only one test of a genuine superiority, and that 
test was as familiar to their ears as it was foreign to their hearts : 
" Let him that will be chief among you, be your servant," a i:)erfect 
definition of a proper aristocracy. Jefferson, Henry, Madison, and 
their circle, who had been contending with the aristocracy of Vir- 
ginia during the whole of their public life, had to consider a remedy 
for this evil also. 



202 LIFE OF THOaiAS JEFFEESON. 

The Established Church, during the ten years preceding the Rev- 
olution, had been pressing heavily upon the people of Virginia. 
Virginians used sometimes to ridicule New Englanders whom they 
chanced to meet, for the persecution of the Quakers in Massachu- 
setts, and the witchcraft delusion of Salem and Boston. It is the 
privilege of an American citizen to be profoundly ignorant of his 
country's history ; and Virginians, availing themselves of this privi- 
lege, are not generally aware, that, at the time when Yankee magis- 
trates were hanging witches and whipping Quakers, Virginia justices 
of the peace were putting Quakers in the j)illory for keeping their 
hats on in church, and appointing juries of matrons to fumble over 
the bodies of old women for " witch-marks," which, of course, they 
found. John Burk, historian of Virginia, intimates that a woman 
was burned to death in Princess Anne County for witchcraft, and 
adds, that, " in all probability, the case was not solitary." And as 
Massachusetts expelled Eoger Williams and others for opinions' 
sake, so did Virginia, in the same generation, refuse a residence to 
some Puritan clergymen who went from Massachusetts to Virginia 
upon the urgent invitation of persons of their own faith. But 
there is this to be said in favor of the Yankees : They recovered 
from the mania of uniformity sooner than the Virginians. If^ in 
1650, they regarded the celebration of the Mass as a capital offence, 
and would not permit the Church of England service to be performed, 
nor the rite of baptism to be administered by immersion, nor a com- 
pany of men to pray with their hats on, yet, in 1750, all these things 
were permitted, except, perhaps, the celebration of the Mass. But, 
in Virginia, the Established Church had become more intolerant as 
the colony increased in population. It seemed so hostile to liberty, 
that James Madison, after coming home from Princeton College in 
New Jersey, where he was educated, expressed the opinion, that, if 
the Church of England had been established and endowed in all the 
colonies as it was in Virginia, the king would have had his way, and 
gradually reduced all America to subjection. 

It was not merely that obsolete (though unrepealed) law still made 
Jefferson and several of his most virtuous friends liable to be burned 
to death for heresy ; nor that a denial of the doctrine of the Trinity 
was legally punishable by three years' imprisonment ; nor that 
Unitaiians could be legall}' deprived of the custody of their own 
children, and those children assigned to drunken and dissolute Trin- 



NEED OF REFORM IN OLD VIRGINIA 203 

itarians ; nor even that Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers had to 
pay for supporting a church they did not attend, — these were not 
the grievances which made Virginians restive under the Establish- 
ment. 

In 1774, when Madison was twenty-three, we find him writing to 
a Northern friend, " I want again to breathe your free air. . . . 
That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among 
some ; and, to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish tlieir quota 
of imps for such purposes. There are at this time, in the adjacent 
county, not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for 
publishing their religious sentiments, which, in the main, are very 
orthodox." These prisoners were Baptists, the most numerous and 
enterprising of the dissenting sects. The historian of tlie Virginia 
Baptists, Semple, throws light ou Mr. Madison's brief, indignant rec- 
ord. The Baptist ministers, from 1768 to 1775, were frequently 
arrested, he tells us ; and, as it was awkward to define their exact 
offence, they were usually arraigned as " disturbers of the peace." 
He gives a ludicrous account of the first arrest, which occurred in 
1768, near the seat of the Madisons. Young Madison, then a lad 
of seventeen, may have witnessed the ridiculous scene. Three Bap- 
tist preachers were seized by the sheriff" on the same Sunday morn- 
ing, and brought to the yard of the parish church, where three 
magistrates, who were in waiting for them, bound them in a thousand 
pounds to appear in court two days after. When they • were 
arraigned, the prosecutor assailed them with the utmost vehemence. 
" May it please Your Honors," he cried, " these men are great dis- 
turbers of the peace. They cannot meet a man upon the road but 
they must ram a text of Scripture down his throat." It so chanced 
that one of the prisoners was a very good lawyer in an unprofes- 
sional way, and made a defence that was embarrassing to magis- 
trates who were resolved to find them in the wrong. The Court 
off'ered, at length, to release them, if they would .give their word not 
to preach for a year. Refusing this, they were ordered into close 
confinement, and went to Spottsylvania Jail, singing, " Broad is the 
road that leads to death," amid the jeers of the mob. After 
remaining in jail (a straw-strewn pen, with grated holes for win- 
dows) for forty-three days, preaching daily through the grated aper- 
tures to a hooting crowd, they were released. 

Worthy John Blair, governor jjro tem., to whom accusers and 



204 LIFE OF THOltlAS JEFFEESON. 

accused hastened to refer the matter, being a man of liberal opin- 
ions, sided, as a matter of course, with the Baptists. He told the 
bigoted squires that the persecution of dissenters only increased 
their numbers, and that the Baptists had really brought some repro- 
bates to repentance. Nay, said he, if a man of theirs is idle, and 
neglects to provide for his family, he incurs the censure of his 
brethren, which has had good effects ; and he only wished Church 
people would try the same system. But there was an ignorant mul- 
titude in Virginia, as bigoted as the county magnates. Hence this 
persecution continued; and the case of these very men was tried 
again at Spottsylvania Court House, and Patrick Henry rode fifty 
miles to defend them. 

But for the account (missed by Wirt) which has been preserved 
of Patrick Henry's performance on this occasion, we should not have 
understood the secret of his power over an assembly. The resistless | 
magic of his oratory was greatly due to artifice, management, I 
extreme and sudden changes in tone, adroit repetition of telling \ 
phrases. He entered the court-house while the prosecuting attorney I 
was reading the indictment. He was a stranger to most of the 
spectators ; and, being dressed in the country manner, his entrance 
excited no remark. When the prosecutor had finished his brief 
opening, the new-comer took the indictment, and, glancing at it with 
an expression of puzzled incredulity, began to speak in the tone of 
a man who has just heard something too astounding for belief: — 

"May it please Your Worships, I think I heard read by the prose- 
cutor, as I entered the house, the paper I now hold in my hand. 
If I have rightly understood, the king's attorney has framed an 
indictment for the purpose of arraigning and punishing by imprison- 
ment these three inoffensive persons before the bar of this court for 
a crime of great magnitude, — as disturbers of the peace. May it 
please the court, what did I hear read ? Did I hear it distinctly, or 
was it a mistake of my own ? Did I hear an expression as of 
crime, that these men, whom Yoiir Worships are about to try for 
misdemeanor, are charged with — with — with what ? " 

Having delivered these words in a halting, broken manner, as if 
his mind was staggering under the weight of a monstrous idea, he 
lowered liis voiceto its deepest bass; and assuming the profouudest 
solemnity of manner, answered his own question : " JPreaclung the 
gosjpel of the Son of God!" 



NEED OF EEFOEM IN OLD VIRGESTIA. 205 

Then lie paused. Every eye was now riveted upon liim, and 
every mind intent ; for all this was executed as a Kean or a Siddons 
would have performed it on the stage, — eye, voice, attitude, gesture, 
all in accord to produce the utmost possibility of effect. Amid a 
silence that could be felt, he waved the indictment three times round 
his head, as though still amazed, still unable to comprehend the 
charge. Then he raised his hands and eyes to heaven, and, in a 
tone of pathetic energy wholly indescribable, exclaimed, '^ Great 
God ! " 

At this point, such was his power of delivery, the audience 
relieved their feelings by a burst of sighs and tears. The orator 
continued, — 

" May it please Your Worships, in a day like this, when Truth is 
about to burst her fetters ; when mankind are about to be aroused to 
claim their natural and inalienable rights ; when the yoke of oppres- 
sion that has reached the wilderness of America, and the unnatural 
alliance of ecclesiastical and civil power are about to be dissev- 
ered, — at sxcch a period, when Liberty, Liberty of Conscience, is 
about to wake from her slumberings, and inquire into the reason 
of such charges as I find exhibited here to-day in this indict- 
ment " — Here occurred another of his appalling pauses, during 
which he cast piercing looks at the judges and at the three clergy- 
men arraigned. Then resuming, he thrilled every hearer by his 
favorite device of repetition, " If I am not deceived, — according to 
the contents of the paper I now hold in my hand, — these men are 
accused of preaching the gospel of the Son of God ! " He waved 
the document three times round his head, as though still lost in 
wonder ; and then, with the same electric attitude of appeal to 
heaven, he gasped, " Great God ! " 

This was followed by another burst of feeling from the spectators ; 
and again this master of effect plunged into the tide of his dis- 
course : — 

" May it please Your Worships, there are periods in the history of 
man when corruption and depravity have so long debased the human 
character, that man sinks under the weight of the oppressor's hand, 
— becomes his servile, his abject slave. He licks tlie hand that 
smites him. He bows in passive obedience to the mandates of the 



206 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIf. 

despot ; and, in this state of servility, he receives his fetters of per- 
petual bondage. But, may it please Your Worships, such a day has 
passed. From that period when our fathers left the land of their 
nativity for these American wilds, — from the moment they placed 
their feet upon the American continent, — from that moment despot- 
ism was crushed, the fetters of darkness were broken, and Heaven 
decreed that man should be free, — free to worship God according to 
the Bible. In vain were all their sufferings and bloodshed to subju- 
gate this New World, if we, their offspring, must still be oppressed 
and persecuted. But, maj^ it please Your Worships, permit me to 
inquire once more, for what are these men about to be tried? This 
paper says, for preaching the gospel of the Saviour to Adam'' s fallen 



race 



/" 



Again he paused. For the third time, he slowly waved the 
indictment round his head ; and then turning to the judges, looking 
them full ill the face, exclaimed with the most impressive effect, 
"What laws have they violated?" The whole assembly were now 
painfully moved and excited. The presiding judge ended the scene 
by saying, '' Sheriff, discharge these men." 

It was a triumph of the dramatic ayt. The men were discharged ; 
but not the less, in other counties, did zealous bigots pursue and 
persecute the ministers of other denominations than their own. Ifc 
was not till the Revolutionary War absorbed all minds, that Baptists 
ceased to be imprisoned ; nor then were they released from paying 
tithes to support a church which they neither attended nor approved. 

Such Avas this old Virginia which Thomas Jefferson and his 
friends were about to ity to reform. A slovenly, slatternly old Eng- 
land in the woods, where the abuses and absurdities of the old coun- 
try were exaggerated, the flower of her young gentlemen now 
desired to change into an orderly, industrious, thoughtful, and 
instructed N'ew England. And what a time to begin, in this 
gloomy autumn of 1776, after New York was lost, and while Wash- 
ington was on the retreat, fighting as he went, not for victory, but 
for escape ! Perhaps the time was not so unpropitious. The minds 
of men, at periods of public danger, are sometimes in a state of 
exaltation that renders it possible for them to receive new truth, and 
gives to persons of understanding an ascendency that is generally 
awarded only to rank, talent, or executive force. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

JEFFERSON^, "WYTHE, AND MADISON BEGIN THE ■WORK OF 
KEFOKMATION. 

There were two parties in the Assembly, of course. But pos- 
terity cares only for the party that triumphs, — the radical party, 
the party in the right. In his own day, the conservative usually is, 
and usually ought to he, uppermost : he represents the human 
family, which is too large a body to move forward rapidl3^ The 
radical usually is one of a small minorit}^, — half a dozen pioneers 
with broad-axes and leathern aprons, who march some paces in 
advance of the regiment, and get little besides scratches and hard 
knocks. But the radical has his revenge. He alone can have any 
enduring success. If the politics of the United States, from 1787 
to 1861, are remembered at all in the general history of the world, 
the only names likely to be preserved will be those of a few trouble- 
some Abolitionists, Democrats, Law-reformers, and Free-traders. 
The triumphant and respectable multitude with whom and for whom 
these contended, sweet Oblivion will claim them, and have its claim 
allowed. 

To Thomas Jefferson, it is evident, the radicals of Virginia looked 
as their chief in the work of reform. First among those upon 
whom he depended for co-operation was that noble-hearted aboli- 
tionist, that humane and high-principled radical; that gentleman 
without pride and without reproach, George Mason of Gunston Hall 
on the Potomac, — he who wrote to a neighbor, just before the 
patriotic Fast Day of 1774, "Please to tell my dear little family 
that I charge them to pay a strict attention to it, and that I desire 
my three eldest sons and my two eldest daughters may attend 
church in mourning, if they have it, as I believe they have." It 
was he who, in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, set his face 

207 



208 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

against all compromise with slavery, ancT* avowed the opinion, that 
the Southern States ought not to he admitted to the T't'nion unless 
they would give it up. It was he who drew that Virginia Bill of 
Rights witli which Mr. Bancroft enriches and ennohlcs the eighth 
Tolume (p. 381) of his History of the United States, — a state- 
ment of principles so advanced that mankind can never outgrow 
them. Brolv en-hearted by the death of his wife, he would not, he 
could not, leave his family to serve Virginia in Congress, though 
the appointment was pressed upon him with tears. But he was in 
his place in the State legislature in this critical year, 1776, ready 
to lend the aid of his humane mind and gifted tongue to every 
enlightened measure. Nature had done every thing for him. A 
superb man he was, of noblest presence and most engaging dignity; 
the ablest man in some kinds of debate whom Virginia possessed ; 
healthy-minded, too, as fond of out-of-door sport almost as Wash- 
ington himself. 

George Wj^the, the abolitionist who emancipated his own slaves 
when he found he could not emancipate Virginia, was sure to be on 
the right side of leading questions, though he was not efficient in 
carrying measures, — a man of the closet rather than the forum. 
Governor Patrick Henry's influence, at that period, was given 
without reserve to liberal measures. These were the great names 
on the liberal side. • 

But tliere was a new member in the house this year, a young man 
of twenty-five, small of stature, wasted by too much study, not in 
the least imposing in appearance, and too modest as yet to utter 
one word in debate, who was destined to be Jefferson's most efiS- 
cient ally during all his career. This was James Madison, to whom 
we all owe so much more than we know, whose services are so little 
remarked because they were so great. He never shone resplendent 
in debate, he never wrote or spoke any thing that was striking or 
brilliant ; but fe\Tt countries have ever possessed so useful a citizen 
as he. From 1776 to 1817, look where you will in the public affairs 
of the United States, you find this little man doing, or helping to 
do, or trying to get a chance to do, the thing that most wanted 
doing. He was the willing horse who is allowed to draw the load. 
His heart was in the business of serving his country. He was 
simply intent on having the right thing done, not to shine in doing 
it. Among his virtues was his joyous love of a jest, which made 



JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 209 

him one of the most agreeable of comrades, and preserved his health 
and spirits to his eighty-fifth year, and lighted up his dying face 
with smiles. It is a pleasure to me to walk in Madison Square 
because it bears his name. Of all Jefferson's triumphs, none seems 
so exceptional as his being able to give to a man so little brilliant 
and so very useful the conspicuous place he held in the public life 
of the United States. They met for the first time at this session O 
of the legislature, and remained friends and political allies for fifty 
years. 

A leader on the conservative side was E. C. Nicholas, for many ,^ 
years the head of the bar in Virginia, a stanch Churchman and 
gentleman of the old school. But Jefferson feared most the singu- o 
lar, tireless persistence of Edmund Pendleton, a cool, wary, accom- 
plished speaker, he says, "full of resource, never vanquished; for, 
if he lost the main battle, he returned upon you, and regained so 
much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manoeuvres, 
skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, 
little singly, were important all together. You never knew when 
you were clear of him." Differ as they might, the leaders of the 
two parties in this House remained excellent friends ; the reason 
being, tliat they, were most scrupulously observant of all the 
forms of courtesy. It was often remarked of Patrick Henry, that 
never, in his most impetuous oratory, was he guilty of personal 
disrespect to a member of the House. On the contrary, he was 
profuse in those expressions of regret for being obliged to differ, 
and of respect for the character of an opponent, which assist so 
much to make public debate a genuine interchange of thought, 
and keep it above the contemptible pettiness of personal contention. 
All the men trained in that old House of Burgesses appear to have 
caught this spirit. What Jefferson said of Madison's manners in 
debate describes all of them who are remembered: "Soothing 
alwa3's the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of 
expression." As to Jefferson himself, not once in his whole public 
career did he lose or weaken a point by needlessly wounding an 
opponent's self-love. 

In the woi'k of re-organizing Virginia, Jefferson struck first at the ■ 
sj^stem of entail. After a three weeks' struggle, that incubus was 
lifted. Every acre and every negro in Virginia, by the 1st of 
November, 1776, was held in fee simple, could be sold for debt, 
14 



210 LITE OF THOMAS JErrERSON". 

was free to fall into hands that were able to use them. It was the 
easiest and quickest of his triumphs, though he did not live long 
enough to outlive the enmity his victory engendered. Some of the 
old Tories found it in their hearts to exult that he who had disap- 
pointed so many fathers lost his only son before it was a month 
old; and John Randolph, fifry-five years after, could still attribute 
all the evils of Virginia to this triumph of "Jefferson and his level- 
ling system." 

He found it easier to set free the estates of his countrymen than 
their minds. Petitions for the repeal of statutes oppressive of the 
conscience of dissenters came pouring in vipon the Assembly from 
the first day of the session. These, being referred to tlie committee 
of the whole, led to the severest and longest struggle of the session. 
" Desperate contests," as Jefferson records, " continued almost daily 
from the 11th of October to the 5th of December." He desired to 
sweep away the whole sj^stem of restraint and monopoly, and estab- 
lish perfect liberty of conscience and opinion, by a simple enactment 
of half a dozen lines : — 

" No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious 
worship, ministry, or place whatsoever ; nor shall be enforced, 
restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods ; nor shall 
otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief: but 
all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their 
opinions in matters of religion ; and the same shall in no wise 
diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." 

It required more than nine years of effort on the part of Jefferson, 
Madison, and their liberal friends, to bring Virginia to accept this 
solution of the religious problem, in its simplicity and completeness. 
All that they could accomplish at this session, after their twenty- 
five days' debate, was the repeal of the statutes imposing penalties 
for going to the wrong church, and compelling dissenters to pay 
tithes. At every subsequent session, for many years, the subject 
was called up, and usually some concession was made to the 
demands of the liberal partj\ In 1779, for example, all forced con- 
tributions for the support of religion were surrendered. The princi- 
ple, however, was retained, and, indeed, re-asserted, that it was part 
of the duty of the government to regulate religious belief; and the 
laws remained in force which made it penal to deny the Trinitj', 
and which deprived a parent of the custody of his children if he 
could not subscribe to the leading articles of the Episcopal creed. 



JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 211 

We have coine now to regard liberty of belief very much as we 
do liberty of breathing, — as a riglit too natural, too obvious, to be 
called in question, — forgetting all the ages of effort and of anguish 
which it cost to rescue the human mind from the domination of its 
natural foes. These nine years of Virginia debates have perished; 
but something of their heat and strenuous vigor survive in a pas- 
sage which Jefferson inserted in l>is Notes on Virginia, written 
towards the end of the Kevolationary War, and circulated in Virgi- 
nia a year before the final triumph of religious freedom. The 
passage is out of place in the work ; and it was probably left in, or 
lugged in, to give aid to Madison in his last contest with the oppo- 
nents of Jefferson's act. Doubtless it had its influence, coming as 
it did from a distant land, and a name bright with the undimmed 
lustre of Kevolutionary successes. Indeed, this vigorous utterance 
of Thomas Jefferson was the arsenal from which the opponents of 
the forced support of religion drew their weapons, during the whole 
period of about fifty years that elapsed between its publication and 
the repeal of the last State law which taxed a community for the 
support of the clergy; nor will it cease to have a certain value as 
long as any man, in any land, is distrusted, or undervalued, or 
abridged of his natural rights, on account of any opinion whatever. 

It is a curiously intense and compact passage, all alive with 
short, sharp sentences, as if he had struggled to get the whole of 
the controversy into a few pages, v Opiniojn, he says, is something 
with which government has nothing fo^T);'"")' It does me no injury 
for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither 
picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Constraint makes hypocrites, 
not converts. A government is no more competent to prescribe 
beliefs, than diet or medicine. '■'■ It is error alone which needs the 
support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion 
to coercion, and whom will you make your inquisitors ? Fallible 
men, governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. 
And why subject it to coercion ? Difference of opinion is advan- 
tageous to religion. The several sects perform the office of censor 
morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable ? Millions of 
innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Chris- 
tianity, have beeu burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned ; yet we have 
not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the 
effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the 



212 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

Other Lalf li^^pocrites ; to support roguery and error all over the 
earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of 
people ; that these profess probably a thousand different systems of 
religion; that ovirs is but one of that thousand; that if there be but 
one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the nine hun- 
dred and ninety-nine wandering sects gathered into the fuld of 
truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect tliis by force. 
Keason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To 
make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged ; and how can 
we wish others to indulge it, while we refuse it ourselves? " 

Fortunately, he was able to alia}' the fears of those who believed 
that virtue would cease to prevail if tithes could not be collected by 
the sheriff, by pointing to Pennsylvania and New York, where 
there was no established church, and yet no indications of a decay 
of morals could be discerned. Keligion was well supported, and no 
more malefactors were hanged than in Virginia. Religious dissen- 
sion was unknown ; for the people had made the happy discovery, 
that the way to silence religious disputes was to take no notice of 
them, and to extinguish religious absiirdity, to laugh at it. He 
urged his countrymen to have the rights of conscience fixed in law 
before the war ended, while rulers were honest and people united; 
for, when i^eace recalled the people to their usual pursuits, he 
feared it would be difficult to concentrate attention upon a matter 
of abstract right. '■' The shackles which shall not be knocked off at 
the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made 
heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive, or expire in a con- 
vulsion." 

In 1716 the act drawn by Jefferson, entitled by him ^' An Act 
for establishing Eeligious Freedom," became the law of Virginia. 
The preamble of the act is a forcible statement of the whole argu- 
ment for freedom of opinion ; and, not content with thus fortifying 
the law, he adds to the act itself a paragraph, which, I believe, is 
unique : " And though we well know that this Assemblj', elected by 
the people for the ordinar}' purposes of legislation only, have no 
power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with 
power equal to our own, and that, therefore, to declare this act 
irrevocable would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, 
and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural 
rights of mankind ; and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to 



JEFFEESON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 213 

repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act will be an 
infringement of natural right." 

Never, perhaps, since the earliest historic times, has one mind so 
incorporated itself with a country's laws and institutions as Jeffer- 
son's with those of new-born Virginia. In this first month of 
October, 1776, besides actually accomplishing much, he cut out 
work enough to keep the best heads of Virginia busy for ten years. 
It was he who drew the bill for establishing courts of law in the 
State, and for defining the powers, jurisdiction, and methods of 
each of them. It was he who caused the removal of the capital 
from Williamsburg to Eichmond, thus originating the plan, since 
followed by nearly every State, of fixing the capital near the geo- 
graphical centre, but remote from the centre of trade, capital, and 
fashion. It may have been best for Virginia, it was best for Vir- 
ginia ; but it is not yet certain that a policy is sound which caused 
the city of Washington to come into being, and which has given 
a fictitious importance to twenty Harrisburgs and Albanys, besides 
affording to official misconduct the convenient cloak of distance. 
Little, however, could Jefferson have foreseen the influence of his 
action, when, in the teeth of the old Tory families planted in the 
ancient capital, he carried the day for the village of Richmond, and 
served on the committee that laid out its public square and placed 
its unfortunate public buildings. 

Another bill introduced by him in this most fruitful month has 
produced consequences far-reaching and momentous. It was a bill 
fixing the terms upon which foreigners should be admitted to citi- 
zenship in Virginia : Two years' residence ; a declaration of inten- 
tion to live in the State, and a promise of fidelity to it ; minor 
children of naturalized parents, and minors without parents in the 
State, to become citizens on coming of age, without any legal for- 
malirj^ The principle of this bill and most of its details have been 
adopted by the national government. In the light of the experience 
of eighty-five years, and writing on Manhattan Island, we can still 
say, that the principle of adniitting foreigners to citizenship on easy 
terms, and after a short residence, has been the vital principle of 
the country's growth ; and that Jefferson's bill lacked but one brief 
clause to make it as safe as it has been powerful : Provided, That 
the foreigner aforesaid proves, to the satisfaction of the court, that 
he can read English well enough to be independent of all other men 



214 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

in acquiring the political information requisite for intelligent 
voting. Alas! he did not foresee the Manhattan Island of 1871; 
nor had a mind yet been created capable of conceiving the idea of 
admitting to the suffrage hordes of ignorant negroes without the 
least preliminary preparation. 

The laws of Virginia were a chaos of obsolete and antiquated 
enactments, good for lawyers, bad for clients. Jefferson brought in 
a bill, in October, 1776, proposing that the House name a committee 
of five, who should get together the whole mass, revise th'em, and 
present, for the consideration of the House, a body of law suited to 
the altered times and circumstances of the State. Tlie bill being 
passed, the five revisers were elected by ballot, and Jefferson 
received the highest number of votes ; his colleagues being Edmund 
Pendleton, George Wythe, George Mason, and F. L. Lee. The two 
last named, not being lawyers, soon withdrew from the commission, 
leaving the three others to do the work, Jefferson's portion of 
which occupied the leisure of two j'ears. It was, indeed, one of the 
most arduous and difficult labors of his life ; for to him was assigned 
the revision of ancient British law, from the remotest period to the 
meeting of the first House of Burgesses of Virginia, of which his 
great-grandfather had been a member, in 1619. Many a long 
journey it cost these three public-souled gentlemen to get together, 
in order to discuss principles and compare work ; until, in 1779, the 
revisers were able to present their labors to the legislature in the 
convenient form of one hundred and twenty-six bills, to be sepa- 
rately acted upon. These bills were taken up, one at a time, as 
occasion favored or demanded, during the next six or seven years; 
every enlightened and humane principle or detail having a most 
persistent and persuasive advocate in James Madison. 

Jefferson's part in this revision was most important. The bill for 
religious freedom, already described, was now completed in the form 
in which it was finally acted upon in 17jp6. Against the opposition 
of Pendleton, he carried the extirpation of the principle of primo- 
geniture from the legal system of Virginia. True to his character, 
Pendleton strove, when the main battle was lost, to save something 
from the wreck ; proposing that the eldest son should, at least, have 
a double portion. No, said Jefferson : " if the eldest son could eat 
twice as much, or do double work, it might be a natural evidence of 
his i;ight to a double portion ; but, being on a par .in his powers and 



JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 215 

wants with his broJ;hers and sisters, he should be on a par also in 
the partition of his patrimony." Against Pendleton, too, Mr. 
Jeiferson prevailed to preserve as much of the letter of ancient law 
as possible, because the meaning of each word and phrase had been 
established by judicial decisions. A new code, Mr. Jefferson 
thought, owing to the imperfection of human language, would 
" involve us in ages of litigation," until the precise meaning of every 
word had been settled by decisions and commentaries. But this did 
not apply to modern Virginia statui:es, which, he thought, should be 
reduced to the utmost simplicity and directness. 

It is pleasing to notice how cordially the revisers labored together, 
and how entirely they confided in one another, though differing in 
opinion. Observe this evidence of it in one of Jefferson's later 
letters : " We found " (on the final revision) " that Mr. Pendleton 
had not exactly seized the intentions of the committee, which were 
to reform the language of the Virginia laws, and reduce the matter to 
a simple style and form. He had copied the' acts verhatlm, only 
omitting what was disapproved; and some family occurrence calling 
him indispensably home, he desired Mr. Wytbe and myself to make 
it what we thought it ought to be, and authorized us to report him 
as concurring in the work." 

The bill assigning pains and penalties cost Jefferson much 
research and thought. The committee swept away at once most of 
the obsolete cruelties of the ancient code ; but some of the revisers 
were disposed to retain portions of the old sj'stem of retaliation, — an 
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a poisoner to die by poison, and a 
maimer to be maimed. Jefferson objected. The infliction of such 
penalties, he thought, would " exhibit spectacles" the moral effect 
of which would not be salutary; particularly (he might have added) 
in a State where every free fight was expected to end in gouging. 
This part of the scheme was, at his suggestion, reconsidered ; so that 
no sheriff in Virginia has ever been called upon to pry out an eye or 
bite off a nose. 

One of Jefferson's substitutions of new sense for ancient folly in 
the penalties bill was admirable. Instead of the old laws concern- 
ing witchcraft, he suggested this: "All attempts to delude the 
people, or to abuse their understanding, by exercise of the pretended 
arts of witchcraft, conjuration, enchantment, or sorcery, or by pre- 
tended prophecies, shall be punished by ducking and whipping, at 



Y 



216 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the discretion of a jury, not exceeding fifteen stripes." He dropped 
also the barbarous Jewish penalties for unnatural crimes, on this 
ground : " Bestiality will ever be properly and severely punished 
by universal derision." In his preamble to the bill assigning penal- 
ties, he asserted doctrines'" many years in advance of the least 
monstrous code then existing. At a time when France condemned 
to death a female servant who stole a spoon, and London saw cart- 
loads of lads drawn to Tyburn for theft, Jefferson began this act by 
declaring that "cruel and sanguinary laws defeat their own purpose, 
by engaging the benevolence of mankind to withhold prosecution;" 
and that "capital punishments, which exterminate instead of 
reforming, should be the last melancholy resource against those 
whose existence has become inconsistent with the safety of their 
fellow-citizens." In this code no crimes were capital but murder 
and treason ; and only an overt act was to be accounted treason. 

Of the bills drawn by Jefferson, those upon which he most set his 
heart failed utterly. Only a commonwealth of Jeffersons, Masons, 
Madisons, and Wythes could have carried into successful operation 
that magnificent scheme of universal education embodied in three 
of the acts drawn by him. He loved knowledge. He loved litera- 
ture. Writing to Dr. Priestly, in themidst of one of the political 
frenzies of a later day, he said, "I thank, on, my knees, him who 
directed my earl^r education, for having put into my possession this 
rich source of delight," — the ability to read Homer in the original; 
and, during a similar paroxysm of political fury, he wrote to a 
neighbor, that if any thing could induce him to sleep another night 
away from home, it would be his solicitude for the education of 
youth. He felt that a community needs the whole of the superior 
intelligence produced in it, and that such intelligence is only made 
available for good purposes by right culture. His plan, therefore, 
embraced the whole intellect of the State. He proposed to place a 
common school within reach of every child; to make a high school 
accessible to every superior .youth ; to convert William and Mary 
College into a university ^jKand to found at Richmond a State 
library to be maintained at a cost of two thousand pounds a year. 
The whole scheme, which was worked out in great detail, was 
received, he says, with enthusiasm ; but when after the war the 
expense had to be faced, there was not public spirit enough in the 
counties to set even the common schools in operation. The scheme 



• JEFFERSOK, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 217 

failed because there was no middle class in Virginia. In his bill for 
establishing common schools, a clause was slyly inserted, leaving 
each county free to tax itself for the purpose or not, as the tax- 
payers should decide. But the tax-payers were planters, served by 
slaves, not accustomed to regard white trash as fellow-citizens 
whose welfare was identified with their own. They would not tax 
themselves for the education of the children of tobacco-rollers, and 
the plan remained inoperative during Jefferson's whole life. 

A remarkable feature of the laws drawn by him daring this 
revision are the preambles — compact, loaded with meaning — with 
which he prefaced many*of them. I think he must have derived 
the idea from Plato. In preparing himself for work so important, 
he could not have overlooked the fact, that Plato's longest work is 
entitled Laws; nor would he have failed to. seek light from so 
promising a source. 

"And is our legislator," asks 9, person of this dialogue, "to have 
no preface to his laws, but to say at once, Do this, avoid that; 
and then, holding the penalty in terrorem, to go on to another 
law, offering never a word of advice or exhortation to those for 
whom he is legislating, after the manner of some doctors ? " Not so, 
he thinks. Music has overtures, and discourse its introduction ; 
"but of the tones and higher strain of law, no one has ever yet 
uttered any prelude." And Plato recurs to the topic, as though it 
were a favorite idea.* I please myself with thinking that it was 
such passages of the kindred Greek that induced Jefferson to 
compose those noble preambles — noble, even when preluding laws 
too difficult for the tinie and scene — which illuminate Virginia law- 
books here and there. The preamble to the act for establishing 
religious freedom is the weightiest and finest. It touches every 
point : it all but exhausts the subject. 

The slave-laws remained to be considered. The revisers, first of 
all, made ^ digest of. existing laws concerning slaves and slavery, 
silently dropping such as they deemed inadmissible, and arranging 
the rest, as was their custom, in the form of a bill. This bill, since 
it contained nothing novel, nor excluded any thing vital, could be 
expected to pass without opposition. The whole difficulty of the 
subject they resolved to keep by itself, and concentrate it in an 

* Jowett's Plato, vol. iv. pp. 24, 243, 2S8, 427, &c. (London edition). 



218 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

amendment to the bill, designing to present this when the times 
should admit of the discussion of fundamental changes. 

The shade of noble, unpractical Plato must have hovered over the 
place where this amendment was pennted. The community has 
never existed capable of executing such a scheme. These three 
benevolent revisers demanded of Virginia a degree of self-control, 
far-seeing wisdom, and executive genius, which a community composed 

' of the elect of the whole human race could not have furnished. All 
slaves born after the passage of the act were to be free ; but they 
were to remain with their parents during childhood, then educated 
at the public expense, "in tillage, arts, or sciences, according to 
their geniuses," until maturity, when they were to be colonized in 
some convenient place, furnished with arms, implements, and seeds, 
declared independent, and protected till they were strong enough to 
protect themselves. While Virginia was employed in this most 
complicated and not inexpensive bjisiness, other ships of hers were 
to repair to other parts of the earth, and bring home "an equal 
number of white inhabitants, to induce whom to migrate hither 
j)roper encouragements were to be proposed." Such ludicrous 
impossibilities may the wisest of mortals conceive who legislate in 
the snug retreat of a library for out-of-door, every-day men, face to 
face with the universal task ! 

■^ No enthusiast ever ventured to introduce this amendment into the 
legislature. "It was found," wrote Mr. Jefferson in 1821, "that 
the public mind would not bear the proposition, nor will it bear it 
even at this day." One thing Jefferson did accomplish. In 1778 
he brought in a bill forbidding the farther importation of slaves, 
which was passed without opposition. This was the only important 
change wdiicli was made in the slave-system of Virginia during the 
Revolutionary period. 

During the two years employed in the work of revising the laws, 
there were four or five sessions of the legislature, ajl of them 
attended by Jefferson. His industry was immense. We find him 
on numberless committees, and reporting every kind of bill ; even 
such as related to the discipline of the militia, the rank of marine 
officers, and the subsistence of members of Congress. There was no 
great merit then in punctuality of attendance, for punctuality was 
compelled. At the calling of the roll on the opening of one session, 
fifty members were absent. Every man of them was ordered under 



JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 219 

arrest; nor was one excused until he had risen in his place, and 
stated tlie reason of his absence. If the reason was accounted 
sufficient, he was excused, without paying the costs of his arrest ; if 
not, he had to pay them. Many and swift journeys fell to Jefferson's 
lot during this absorbing time, — to Fredericksburg to meet his 
brother revisers, a rough ride of a hundred and twenty miles ; to 
Williamsburg, for the semi-annual session ; back suddenly to Monti- 
cello, more than once, to attend his sick wife. His only son was 
born in May, 1777, and lived but seventeen days, though causing his 
parents many a month of anguish and solicitude. But at home, 
while the lives of mother and child seemed to hang upon the 
father's care, in the intervals of watching he worked at his part of 
the revision. He told Dr. Franklin, in August, 1777, that the people 
of Virginia had laid aside the monarchical, and taken up the 
republican government "with as much ease as would have attended 
their throwing off an old and putting on a new suit of clothes." 
It was easy to the people of Virginia, because- at this critical time 
they were so happy as to possess a few able, experienced, leai-ned, 
liberal-minded citizens, who thought no labor- severe, no self-denial 
excessive, if exercised in the service of their country. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

•iflEST THREE YEARS OF THE WAR. 

So passed the first years of the war. It was an anxious time, of 
course, to all patriotic hearts, but, to the people of Virginia, not 
so unhappy a period as we sliould suppose. Their trial was to come. 
Early rid of the nuisance of Dunmore's hateful presence, they had 
not, since the burning of Norfolk, witnessed much of the desolations 
of the war; and, if their spirits were depressed sometimes by the 
mishaps of the armies in the North, good news came occasionally, 
and came magnified by the distance it had travelled. The rapturous 
tidings of Burgoyne's surrender was enough of itself to light up 
half a year; and it was followed by news supposed to be even more 
important, that of the alliance with France. Virginia was to have 
her turn, but the time had not yet come. 

Jefferson, too, was to experience a most ample share of the bitter- 
ness of the war. But during these three years of it, absorbed in 
congenial and elevated labors, happy in the confiding love of the 
people he served, blest at home in wife and children, he lived very 
much in his accustomed way; still finding time to record the 
weather, watch the barometer, observe eclipses, measure the rain, 
compute the force of the wind, study the growth of plants, and 
caress the violin. He began now to look forward fondly, as so many 
fond parents have, to the time when his eldest daugliter would play 
the harpsichord to his accompaniment. His old teacher of the 
violin, Alberti, was in Paris in 1778. Jefferson wrote him a gay 
letter after Burgoyne's surrender; telling him that Americans had 
lost all apprehensions touching the issue of the war, and he expected 
to trouble him, within the next two and three years, to send him 
over a professor competent to teach singing and the harpsichord. 
Nay, more: he had indulged dreams of a domestic band of music! 

220 



FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE WAE. 221 

He tokl Alberti, that, in his retinue of domestic servants, he kept a 
weaver, a gardener, a cabinet-maker, and a stone-cutter, to whom he 
meant to add a vine-dresser. Why could not Alberti send him 
Europeans of these trades, who could also play on instruments? If 
he could, — behold a band of music upon Monticello, without going 
"beyond the bounds of an American fortune!" Music, he said, 
was " the favorite passion of his soul ; " and yet fortune had cast his 
lot in a country where it was in a state of "deplorable barbarism." 
In the same joyous and triumphant summer of 1778, failing to get 
much good from the eagerly-expected and closely-obferved eclipse of 
the sun, from want of an accurate clock, he ordered from Kittenhouse 
the most perfect clock his art could produce, so as to be ready for the 
next. A.S to that theodolite of which he had spoken to him in 
Philadelphia, Mr. Rittenhouse need not trouble himself about it 
further; for he had since bought one which was just the thing. A 
British army captured, and the French alliance avowed, who could 
expect a much longer continuance of the war ? Not Jefferson, most 
sanguine of men. 

Tlie surrender of Burgoyne brought unexpected animation to the 
neighborhood of Monticello, and filled the house upon its summit 
with agreeable company. The region round about being the wheat- 
field of America, but too remote from the Northern army to contrib- 
ute to its supply, Congress deemed it best, in the winter of 1778- 
79, to march thither the prisoners of war, English and German, four 
thousand in number, and establish them near Charlottesville. It 
was a dreary and weary march, in an inclement season, from Boston 
to Albemarle, a distance of seven Imndred miles ; and when the 
troo2:)S reached the plateau selected for them, within sight of Monti- 
cello, the barracks were unfinished, no store of food had been gath- 
ered, the roads were almost impassable, and " the spell of weather," 
as Jefferson records, "was the worst ever known within the memory 
of man." The gentlemen of the county did their utmost to miti- 
gate the situation ; and who so prompt with needful aid as the 
inhabitants of Monticello? Mrs. Jefferson lent her help to the wife 
of the Hessian General Riedesel, in getting her started in housekeep- 
ing, at the house of Mazzei, their Italian neighbor, who was just 
going home to Tuscany on a public errand. 

Jefferson himself was lavish of attention to officers and men of 
both nationalities j and, when they were all settled in quarters, 



222 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOlSr. 

tlirew open Ins house, his libraiy, his grounds, his garden, to such 
of them as could enjoy refined pleasures. There could be no lack 
of officers, among so many, who could play and sing. Many a 
delightful concert was improvised at Monticello, when some amateur 
would play violin duets with Jefferson, and the whole company sur- 
round Mrs. Jefferson's harpsichord, and join her in singing. A tra- 
dition of these pleasant musical evenings lives to tliis day. General 
Dix of New York, as Mr. Randall reports, heard them described by 
a Captain Bibby, who settled in New York after the war. This 
captain, himself a good violinist, played many a duet with Jeffer- 
son, and considered him the best amateur he had ever heard. A 
German officer of scientific tastes was much in the library of JNIon- 
ticello, a congenial companion to its proprietor. Even General Phil- 
lips, commander of the English troops, whom Jefferson describes as 
the proudest man of the proudest nation on earth, was not proof 
against his resolute civilities. " The great cause that divides our 
countries," Jefferson wrote to the general, " is not to be decided by 
individual animosities. The harmony of private societies cannot 
weaken national efforts. To contribute by neighborly intercourse 
and attention to make others happy is the shortest and surest way 
of being happy ourselves." General Phillips, proud as he may 
have been, seems to have assented to this opinion; for we find him 
writing to Mr. Jefferson in August, 1779 : " The British officers 
intend to perform a play next Saturday at the barracks. I shall be 
extremely happy to have the honor to attend you and Mrs. Jeffer- 
son in my box at the theatre, should you or that lady be inclined to 
go." * In winding up this polite epistle, the haughty son of Albion 
was careful to say that he was, "with great personal respect," Mr. 
Jefferson's humble servant. He was the gentleman, who, at a later 
day, addressed Mr. Jefferson as " Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, Ameri- 
can Governor of Virginia ; " and the governor retorted by addressing 
him as, "William Phillips, Esquire, commanding the British troops 
in Virginia." 

As the spring advanced, the barracks began to exhibit a truly 
inviting scene, particularly the quarter occupied bj^ the Germans. 
The officers, who had lijred every available house in the neighbor- 
hood, bought cows, sheep, and chickens, cultivated fields, and laid 

* Lossing's American Historical Record, vol. i, p. 33. 



FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE WAR. 223 

out gardens. If some of the decorous Virginia ladies wore a little 
scandalized at the Amazonian habits of Madame Riedesel, who rode 
astride with the boldness of a fox-hunter, every one commended the 
liberality of the general toward his men. He distributed among 
them two hundred pounds' worth of seeds ; and soon the whole 
region round the barracks was smiling with pretty gardens, and 
alive with cheerful laborers, conveying to the spectator, as Jefferson 
said, "the idea of a company of farmers, rather than a camp of sol- 
diers." Some of the officers went to great expense in refitting 
their houses, even to several thousands of dollars. The health of 
these troops, thus agreeably situated and pleasantly employed, im- 
proved in the most remarkable manner. According to the ordinary 
rate of mortality, tliere should have been one death a day ; but in 
three months there were but four deaths among them, and two of 
those were of infants. 

Jefferson wrote in reference to this enchanting scene, "It is for 
the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as 
possible. The practice, therefore, of modern nations, of treating 
captive enemies with politeness and generosity, is not only delight- 
ful in contemplation, but really interesting to all the world, — friends, 
foes, and neutrals." 

It is pleasing to reflect that the United States, from tlie first hour 
of its existence to the present time, in every instance, and in spite 
of the bitterest provocation to the contrary in three wars, has treated 
captives with "politeness and generosity." 

The prisoners might well be grateful to Jefferson, for he rendered 
them a greater service than neighborly attention. A panic fear arose, 
that these four thousand foreign mouths would eat Virginia out of 
house and home. A famine was dreaded, and Governor Henry was in- 
undated with remonstrances against their longer stay. By the time 
the barracks were in order, the gardens laid out, and General Rie- 
desel's two hundred pounds' worth of garden-seeds all nicely " come 
up," a terrible rumor ran through the camp, that the governor had 
yielded to pressure, and was about to order them away. It was Jef- 
ferson who interposed in their behalf. He wrote a most A'igorous 
and elaborate statement of the case to Governor Henry, showing 
the utter groundlessness of the panic, describing the happy situation 
of the troops after their winter march of seven ^i*i*dred miles, and 
exhibiting the cruel breach of faith it would be to compel them so 



224 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

soon to resume their wanderings. The prisoners' camp was not dis- 
turbed ; and the Virginians discovered, that, if the prisoners ate a good 
deal of wheat and beef, tliey circulated a great many gold and silver 
coins. 

Wliat strikes me as peculiar in Jefferson's letter is its extreme 
politeness. Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry had been friends, 
comrades, fellow-lodgers, partisans, every thing that was intimate 
and confidential, for nineteen years; but in this letter he keeps in 
mind that he is a member for Albemarle writing to Plis Excellenc}'' 
the Governor of Virginia, and he both begins and ends his epistle 
with expressions of deference and apology. He "takes the liberty 
of troubling " the governor with some observations on the subject. 
The reputation and interest of the country being involved, " it could 
hardly be deemed an indecent liberty in the most private citizen to 
offer his thoughts to the consideration of the Executive ; " and there 
were particular reasons which justified liim in so doing ; such as his 
residence near the barracks, his public relation to the people of that 
county, and his being sui-e, from liis personal acquaintance with the 
governor and council, that they would be " glad of information from 
an]i quarter, on a subject interesting to the public." Then, at the 
end of his letter, after an argument apparently complete and unan- 
swerable, he was *' sensible that the same subject might appear to 
different persons in very different lights." But he hoped that the 
reasons he had urged, even though to sounder minds they should seem 
fallacious, would, at least, be plausible enough to excuse his inter- 
position. 

There was a reason for this extreme delicacy. The letter was 
written in IMarch, 1779. The third year of Patrick Henry's gover- 
norship would expire in June ; and, by the new constitution, a gover- 
nor was ineligible after the third term. Jefferson was to succeed him ; 
and it is always a delicate thing for an heir to say or do any thing 
that savors of interference with the management of the estate. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

JEFFERSON GOVEKXOR OF VIEGII^^IA. 

College friends find themselves strangely confronted, sometimes, 
in afterlife, — rivals, perhaps, for prizes more important than a higli 
place in a commencement programme. In January, 1779, the Vir- 
ginia Legislature had to choose a governor to succeed Patrick Henry, 
whose third term would expire on the 1st of June. The favorite 
candidates were no other than John Page and Thomas Jefferson, 
fellow-students at William and Mary, who had exchanged love- 
confidences, and gone with thumping hearts together to meet their 
sweethearts at the balls in the lialeigh Tavern at Williamsburg ; 
and not so very long before, either. In 1779 they were still young 
men, thirty-six both ; Page being fifteen days the elder. The gild- 
ing was still bright on some parts of the state-coach which Lord 
Botetourt had brought over from England about the time of their 
entering public life ; and " the palace " had not yet been defaced by 
vandal hands. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts saw that tre- 
mendous vehicle, as late as 1781, in an outhouse near the palace ; 
"a clumsy machine," he thought it; "as. heavy as two common 
wagons;" "gilded in every part, even the edges of the tires of the 
wheels, and the arms of Virginia painted on every side." On the 
day, ten years before, when these two young friends had smiled 
derision at this historic coach, as it bore the new governor to the 
Capitol, who were less likely than they to be candidates for the 
right to ride in it ? Things had changed, indeed, in Virginia, since 
young Jefferson had put his fiddle under his arm, and gone to "the 
palace" to take his part in one of Governor Fauquier's weekly con- 
certs. 

Page's strong point was, that, though born a member of the plan- 
tation aristocracy, possessing a great estate, inhabiting the largest 
15 225 



226 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

house ever built in Virginia, and enjoying the honor most coveted 
by his class, a seat at the viceregal council-'board, he had, from the 
beginning of the controversy with the king, sided with his country. 
The contest was a warm one between the friends of the candidates ; 
but between the candidates themselves there was no contest. It 
was part of the recognized etiquette of politics then, which both of 
these gentlemen observed, that the candidates for a responsible exec- 
utive post should take no part, either by word or deed, in the canyass. 
Jefferson was elected by a majority of a very few votes. His old 
friend wrote him a letter of apology and congratulation, and Jeffer- 
son replied with the tact which good-nature inspires. " It had given 
me much pain," he said, "that the zeal of our respective friends 
should ever have placed us in the situation of competitors. I was 
comforted, however, with the reflection, that it was their comjietition, 
not ours, and that the difference of the numbers which decided 
between us was too insignificant to give you a pain or me a pleasure, 
had our dispositions towards each other been such as to admit those 
sensations." Twenty-three years later, when Jefferson was presi- 
dent, he had the pleasure of congratulating his friend Page on his 
election to the governorship of their native State. 

The governor elect took the lead in one important administrative 
act before he was sworn in. The war was gas-ping for money ; for 
the legal-tender notes were rushing down the sharp decline that led 
from par to zero ; and, as yet, the French troops had not begun to 
scatter coin about the country, nor Dr. Franklin to coax more mil- 
lions from the French treasury than were needed to freight a few 
ships with military stores. One of Jefferson's friends in the House, 
who had rented four thousand acres of good land before the war to 
tenants at six pounds a year per hundred acres, and received his 
rents in 1778 in the legal-tender currency, had not money enough 
from that estate to buy twenty barrels of corn. Governor Jefferson's 
magnificent salary of four thousand five hundred pounds a year was 
not enough, when he began to receive it, to supply the inmates of "the 
palace " with food ; and, when he went out of office, it would only 
buy the governor a new saddle. This was the period when members 
of Congress — the ruling power of the United States — had to bor- 
row little sums from their landladies in order not to be quite penni- 
less. Elbridge Gerry, member from Massachusetts, a man of good 
estate in Marblehead, was behind with his board, in 1779, a hundred 



1 



JEFFERSON GOVEENOR OF VIRGINIA. 227 

and forty-seven dollars, besides being obliged to borrow twenty-seven 
from his landlady, and going in debt sixteen to his tailor and shoe- 
maker. At the head of the finance committee, which had to deal 
with millions, he had not sixpence in his personal pocket with which 
to buy a pair of shoestrings. 

Hard money alone, as it was thought, could restore the currency. 
Jefferson's Italian neighbor, Philip Mazzei, who had once been in 
office under the Duke of Tuscany, told him that the duke, like His 
Higliness of Hesse-Cassel, was a great hoarder of mone}'-, and, only 
three years before, had had " ten million crowns lying dead in his 
treasury ; " part of which, Mazzei thought, he could borrow for the 
United States, if he could be sent over properly authorized. Jefier-" 
son wrote to John Adams on the subject, stating the facts, and 
commending Mazzei as " a native of that duchy, well connected there, 
conversant in courts, of great understanding, and equal zeal in our 
cause." Nothing came of this suggestion, so far as is known ; and 
those ten million crowns remained in the duke's strong-box, though 
the struggling States needed them so much, — needed them more 
and more. Doubtless the two neighbors talked over those precious 
crowns often enough as they sat by Jefferson's fireside on Mouticello, 
or strolled about in Mazzei's young vineyards. Indeed, whenever, 
in this impecunious world, there is known to be a large lump of 
money "lying dead" anywhere, there are sure to be individuals 
scheming for its resurrection. Besides, was not the Duke of Tuscany, 
though an Austrian prince, a brother of Marie Antoinette, queen of 
France, known to be enthusiastic for Franklin and the noble insur- 
gents ? And had not Philip Mazzei sent his duke an Italian transla- 
tion of tlie Declaration of Independence ? How plausible, on the 
breezy heights of Albemarle, seemed the scheme of getting some of 
those dead crowns from Tuscany, and giving them life in Virginia ? 

Philip Mazzei, who had all an Italian's ardor for the American 
cause, offered to go himself without compensation to his native land, 
and negotiate the loan ; and soon after the election of Jefferson to 
the governorship, he sailed, commissioned by Governor Henry and 
his Council, to borrow from his prince a sum not to exceed nine hun- 
dred thousand pounds sterling, and to buy with part of it a quantity 
of supplies for Virginia's quota of troops. Kot fto exceed ! It is 
always prudent to limit strictly the powers of an agent. Mazzei 
•might, in his excessive zeal, carry ofi" the whole ten million crowns I 



228 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK. 

It was a costly mission to poor Mazzei. His misfortunes began 
before he left home. He rented his house to the Hessian general, 
Baron Riedesel, who moved in, with his Amazon of a wife and his 
large military family, before the Italians could move out. It was a 
tight squeeze, as the baroness recorded ; and Mazzei, it seems, had 
no notion of the amount of sustenance required by so many Hessian 
warriors, and a baroness who rode astride. " We looked impatiently 
forward," wrote the lady, " to the time of his departure, and that of 
his wife and daughter, on account of the smallness of the house and 
the scarcity of provisions." She took the liberty of remarking one 
day, that a calf's head and tripe was not enough for twenty persons' 
dinner; but the frugal Italian replied that ''we could make a very 
good soup of it." He did, however, add to the repast "two cabbages 
and some stale ham ;" and this, says the baroness, " was all we could 
obtain from him." The Italians left the house at last ; and, long 
before they had made their way across the sea, the Hessians' horses 
had trampled their vineyards, planted with so much care, and 
watched by Jefferson and by all intelligent Virginia with so much 
interest, into irremediable ruin. 

In Paris, face to face with practical Dr. Franklin, the project of 
extracting nine hundred thousand pounds sterling from the coffers of 
an Austrian duke addicted to hoarding, at an interest of five per cent, 
for a province four thousand miles off, whose independence the duke 
had not acknowledged and would not acknowledge, did not wear so 
feasible an aspect as it had on Jefferson's piazza, overlooking the 
rich garden of Virginia. If the Duke of Tuscany was brother to a 
romantic queen of France, he was also brother to an emperor of Aus- 
tria, who reminded Paris patriots that he was a king by trade. 
Tuscany ! The very name was enough to put even the placid 
Franklin out of temper; for he had had an eye himself upon those 
Tuscan crowns, hneio they could not be got, and was in full quarrel 
with llalph Izzard of South Carolina for draAving twenty^ve hun- 
dred pounds sterling per annum, in his character of Tuscan minis- 
ter, though unable to do so much as to get permission to enter 
Tuscany. Franklin was barely civil to the sanguine and generous 
Italian. At their first interview, the moment he learned Mazzei's 
errand, he dashed cold water upon the scheme. " So many peo- 
ple," he said, " have come to Europe on that kind of business, that 
they have ruined our credit, and made the money-men shy of 



JEFFERSON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 229 

US." * Mazzei argued in vain. As often as he went out to Passy, and 
broached the subject, Franklin "never failed," as Mazzei reported 
to Governor Jefferson, " giving some mark of disapprobation and 
displeasure." And well he might, since he had already offered six 
per cent for the very crowns which Virginia hoped to get for five. 
The Duke of Tuscany kept his money; Mazzei returned to Virginia 
to find his estate in ruins, and to seek in vain compensation for his 
losses ; and the governor passed his two terms in torture, with hostile 
fleets ravaging the shores, and hostile armies menacing the interior, 
while every effort to defend the State was " cramped for want of 
money." 

In sending Mazzei upon this mission to a reigning prince, Virginia 
performed the act of a sovereign State. In the same spirit, and 
evidently without a thought of impropriety, the legislature, on the 
second day of Jefferson's governorship, June 2, 1779, formally 
ratified the treaty with France. Such acts as these throw a valua- 
ble light upon the subsequent State-Rights controversy. This rati- 
fication seems to me so remarkable, that I will copy the resolutions 
by which it was authorized : — 

" Eesolved, nemine contradicente. That it is the opinion of 
this Assembly, that the treaties of alliance and commerce between his 
Most Christian Majesty of France on the one part, and the Congress 
of the United States of America, on behalf of the said States, on the 
other part, ought to be ratified, confirmed, and declared binding on 
this Commonwealth. 

" Resolved, That the governor be desired to notify to the minister 
of His Most Christian Majesty, resident at Philadelphia, the above 
ratification, under the seal of the Commonwealth." 

On the 1st of June, then, 1779, ^Ir. Jefferson became His Excel- 
lency, the second republican governor of Virginia. In his public 
life hitherto, all had been plain sailing ; for the wind and tide had 
been strongly in his favor, and the services which he had been called 
upon to render were such as his character and habits had fitted him 
to perform. How different the task which confronted him now ! 
Kot more difficult nor nobler, but far more difficult to him. And 

* Lossing'B American Histoi-ical Keeord, vol. i. p. 33. 



230 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

from the time of his election in January, to the day when he was 
sworn in, the situation had been growing, every week, more compli- 
cated and menacing. If, in January, he had been gratified by the 
honor done him, jirobably on the 1st of June he shrank dismayed 
from the responsibility which that honor brought with it. 

The French alliance, he now knew, was working ill in two ways, 
— in relaxing the vigor of the States, and rendering the foe more 
unanimous and more savage. The three British commissioners had 
announced to ' all the world that the nature of the contest was 
changed by the alliance with France. Britain was, thenceforth, 
going to use all the means for subduing rebellious colonies which 
" God and Nature had placed in her hands." Since America might 
ere long become an accession to France, the common law of self-pre- 
servation (said the commissioners) " will direct Great Britain to ren- 
der that accession of as little avail to her as possible." The colonies 
were to be subdued by being destroyed. America was to be laid 
waste. This declaration, published in October, 1778, was acted upon 
at once by Henry Hamilton, commandant of Detroit, by marcliing 
into the western wilderness to rouse the Indians to war against Vir- 
ginia. Ths State over wliich Jefferson ruled extended to the Missis- 
sippi, and embraced all the territory which we now call Virginia, 
West Virginia, and Kentucky, besides a great part of what is now 
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. I need not remind the reader that 
that rich and well-watered region swarmed with Indians, among 
the best and bravest of their race. Taking post at Vincennes on 
the Wabash, a hundred miles from its junction with the Ohio, 
Colonel Hamilton spent the winter in " talking " with chiefs, gather- 
ing supplies, and preparing for a desolating swoop over Kentucky 
into the settlements of Virginia. An Indian war, therefore, was 
among the difficulties preparing for the governor elect while he was 
receiving the congratulations of his friends. He knew it not, how- 
ever. It was a good " express " who could keep either his despatches 
or his scalp while making his way from the Wabash to the James in 
1779. 

British commanders at the South executed the threats of the com- 
missioners not less. Thej'', too, were to ravage and devastate a 
country which they had tried in vain to conquer. The war was now 
to be transferred to the South, too thinly settled to resist, it was 
thought, yet offering an inviting field for spoliaiion. Americans, as 



.raFFERSON GOVERNQR OF VIRGINIA 231 

they wander about the dusty interior of St. Paul's Cathedral in Lon- 
don, remark with surprise that the most sliowy monument there com- 
memorates a soldier associated in tlieir minds . with defeat, — the 
great defeated, Cornwallis. He certainly behaved at the South more 
in the style of a bandit than a soldier; not disdaining petty larceny, 
it appears, when he saw a precious object that could be conveniently 
pocketed and carried off. His system being to wreak the king's 
vengeance, rather than promote his country's interest, his orders 
were to imprison and despoil every man who would not take arms in 
his service, and to hang every man, who, after being tlius impressed, 
made his escape, and joined his brethren in arms on the other side. 

Governor Jefferson, therefore, from the watch-tower of his high 
office, had sometimes to look half a dozen ways at once. The 
flower of the men of Virginia were, of course, in the army under 
Washington. They must be looked to, and their numbers \s.Q\)t up. 
But tliat new enemy in the Carolinas, able, enterprising, relent- 
less, must be opposed with all the force which Virginia could spare ; 
since to defeat Cornwallis in North Carolina was the only way to 
keep him out of Virginia : it was self-defence. The Indians were a 
third object of attention. The thousands of British and German pris- 
oners in Albemarle occasioned constant solicitude ; and the more as 
the war drew nearer the borders of the State, and as the men of the 
State were drawn away to serve in distant camps. On the side of 
the ocean there was always a wide and an oj^en door to danger. 
Nothing but a fleet will ever be able to shut out a fleet from Chesa- 
peake Bay; and what was Virginia's navy then? Four little 
cruisers, carrying in all sixty-two guns. And as to Hampton Roads 
and the mouth of the James River, military men think that even 
now, in this year 1874, after fifty-nine years' work upon Fortress 
Monroe and the Ripraps, there is nothing there which could stop a 
good iron-clad. Certainly there was nothing in 1779 that could 
stop a wooden frigate. Three weeks before Jefferson's inauguration, 
a fleet of a dozen vessels, with two thousand troops on board, had 
run in without firing or receiving a shot, and landed troops without 
the least molestation. These troops carried out their part of the 
new programme. They spent several days in ravaging, burning, 
plundering, murdering, while the militia fled helpless ; for in Vir- 
ginia, in 1779, there was only one musket. left to every four or five 
men ; and the unarmed militia of the region could not even limit the 



232 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

area of spoliation. When at last Governor Henry had got together 
an armed force of some magnitude, the bold marauders ceased 
destroying turpentine, tobacco, and pork, ceased despoiling farm- 
houses and burning villages, and went at their leisure on board their 
ships, and sailed away. The smoke of their burning had not 
ceased to ascend to heaven when Jefferson took the oath. What 
had been done once, he well knew, could be done again. 

That was the situation : front door open to hostile fleets ; back 
door, to hostile Indians ; General Washington wanting all that Vir- 
ginia had of men, money, arms, and food ; a powerful foe at the South 
anxious to get over the border ; one gun to four or five men, and 
a most plentiful lack of all other warlike material which can only 
be got with money. This was the task which had fallen to the lot 
of a lawyer of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a 
love of science, literature, and gardening. But mind is mind, in- 
telligence is intelligence. I would not choose Mr. Emerson or Mr. 
Darwin to command an expedition, or govern a country ; but if, in 
the course of events, it fairly fell to their part to undertake either 
of those tasks, I should confidently look to their acquitting them- 
selves respectably. Moreover, the individual at the head of a free 
republic does really have at command, and may utilize, its whole 
intelligence, as we saw Mr. Lincoln do during the late wiir. Jeffer- 
son had near him a Council and Assembly which contained the best 
sense that Virginia could spare from the field. 

The gloom which hung over' the State in consequence of the late 
unchecked and unpunished ravages of the enemy near the sea was 
dispelled, before the new governor had been many days in office, by 
most cheering news from the ojjposite quarter. 

Virginia had in the field, at that time, two eminent heroes : one 
so known to all mankind, that he need not be named; the other 
now almost fallen out of memory : one at the head of the armies 
of America ; the other in the Far West, twelve hundred miles from 
the capital of Virginia, with a band of a hundred and fifty kindred 
spirits, holding back, by the force of his single will, the Indians from 
the frontiers of his native State. George Eogers Clarke was the 
name of this other hero. Ho was a native of Jefferson's own coun- 
t}'' of Albemarle; "our Colonel Clarke," he calls him; a neighbor 
of the governor ; not twentj^-six years old when Governor Henry 
sent him into the wilderness; in the spring of 1778, to protect the 



JEFFERSON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 233 

border. This hero is not as famous as Leonidas or Hannibal, only 
because he has not had such historians as they. But he defended 
the western homes of Virginia precisely as Hannibal would have 
done. By way of giving the Indians something to do in their own 
country, he floated and marched to the post of Kashaskias on the 
Mississippi, took it, held it as a base ; struck for other posts near by, 
terrified some tribes, seduced others, broke the spell of British in- 
fluence, became lord paramount in the land of the Illinois ; showing 
himself a most swift, alert, tough, untiring, closely-calculating com- 
mander. No order from home helped or hindered him. "Not a 
scrape of jonv pen," he wrote to the governor in April, 1779, " have 
I received from you for near twelve months." 

In the midst of his success, when he had held the Indians quiet 
for nine months. Colonel Hamilton interposed, marching from De- 
troit, and taking post at Vincennes on the Wabash, right between 
Clarke and Virginia. Instantly the whole aspe9t of things was 
changed ; for Hamilton was a man of energy and skill, long familiar 
with Indians, unscrupulous, willing to let his Indians wage war in 
the Indian manner. Whole tribes fell off from Clarke, and joined 
Hamilton, who had guineas, wampum, weapons, red cloth, and all 
that an Indian prizes. War parties streaked the prairies, and glided 
through the woods. The Indians of the whole western wilderness, 
from the Alleghanies to the Great Biver, were agitated or astir. 
Clarke prepared to sell his post as dearly as he could ; for, as he said, 
he had not men enough to stand a siege, and was too remote to 
send for aid. But while he was in the rush of preparation, calling 
in his outposts, burning superfluous and obstructive houses, making 
all tight and snug for a desperate fight, came news that Hamilton 
had sent out so many parties from Vincennes, that he had but eighty 
men left to defend the post. His resolution was taken ; for, really, 
he had but one chance. Let him wait at Kaskaskias till the spring 
opened, and he would have Hamilton, British troops, and thousands 
of Indians, upon him, against whom his little band could fight only 
to be at last tortured and burnt alive. 

The distance from Kaskaskias to Vincennes was a hundred and 
fifty miles ; Clarke's force, about one hundred and fifty men. Send- 
ing a barge round by river with the artillery and stores, he struck 
across the country with a hundred and thirty soldiers, joined on the 
way by a few young men of the country. It was in the midst of 



234 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the great February thaw, the rivers all overflowing, the swamps 
under water, the prairies soft, the woods soaked and dripping. On 
the eleventh day they were within nine miles of Vincennes ; but 
those nine miles were covered with the waters of the overflowing 
Wabash. It took the band five days to accomplish the distance, 
" having to wade often," saj'-s the heroic leader ; and, the last six 
miles, " up to our breasts in water." They must have perished, he 
added, if the weather had not been warm. Reaching dry land, an 
hour after dark, they saw the place before them ; when, all chilled 
and. wet as they were, they began the attack; and, after an eighteen 
hours' fight, took the post and all its garrison without the loss of a 
man. It was Clarke's audacity, fortitude, and skill that won this 
victor^'-, which, in its consequences, was one of the most important 
of the war ; for, besides relieving the whole frontier of apprehension 
from the Indians, it confirmed Virginia's claim to the possession of 
the country, andjiad its due weight in the final negotiations. 

The victors were bountifully rewarded. A few days after, they 
made an easy capture of forty men and ten thousand pounds' worth 
of goods, floating down the river to re-enforce Colonel Hamilton. In 
short, George Rogers Clarke was lord of the West, vice Henry Hamil- 
ton, deposed, and sent as a prisoner of war, with his chief officers, to 
the governor of Virginia. " But what crowned the general joy," 
wrote Clarke to the governor, " was tlie arrival of William Morris, 
my express to you, with your letters, which gave general satisfaction. 
The soldier}'', being made sensible of the gratitude of their country 
for their services, were so much elated that they would have at- 
tempted the reduction of Detroit, had I ordered them." William 
Morris was despatched with tidings of this new triumph ; but, as he 
was killed on the way, it was not until the beginning of June, a hun- 
dred days after the event, that Jeft'erson received the intelligence. 

The success of Colonel Clarke, though it relieved the governor's 
mind from an ever-present dread, devolved upon him a painful duty. 
Hamilton and two of his officers reached Williamsburg, prisoners, 
charged with having incited the Indians to scalp, massacre, torture, 
and burn ; Hamilton himself having confined in a dungeon without 
fire, and loaded with chains, and cruelly tormented, an American 
citizen. For four years Congress and the people had seen, with a 
sorrowing and indignant amazement, the cruelty with which English 
commanders had uniformly treated American prisoners of war ; and 



JEFFERSOlSr GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 235 

they had sought to avenge the wrong by lieaping coals of fire upon 
their heads, treating English and Hessian prisoners with an extrav- 
agance of generosity. In their unique manifesto of October 30, 
1778, the Congress of the United States had declared to the world, 
that, " considering themselves bound to love their enemies," they 
had " studied to spare those who were in arms against them, and to 
ligliten the chains of captivity." This was the simple truth. The 
British prisoners had been, courted and petted, rather than abused. 
Jeft'erson and his neighbors had personally striven to render the stay 
of the Burgoyne prisoners in Albemarle, not endurable merely, but 
delightful. 

I can perfectly understand the feelings of the Virginians on this 
occasion ; because, during the late war, while Union prisoners were 
dying in anguish at Andersonville, unsheltered, and not permitted 
to shelter themselves from the blasting Georgia sun and rain, I saw, 
near Fortress Monroe, Confederate prisonex's in an exquisite seaside 
hospital, nourished, while their wounds were healing, upon a diet of 
altei'nate broiled .chicken and lamb-chop, with a glass of delicate 
hock (whenever ordered by the physicians) at eleven and four ; and 
as well treated, in all essential particulars, as Queen Victoria could 
be if she lay sick in Windsor Castle. Having seen this sight in 
September, 1864, I can understand how it was that the governor of 
Virginia and his council, in June, 1799, came to the conclusion to 
discontinue the refined coals-of-fire system, and try the vulgar 
method of retaliation. The council, in fact, " resolved to advise the 
governor," that the three prisoners from Vincennes " be put in irons, 
confined in the dungeons of the public jail, debarred the use of perJ", 
ink, and paper, and excluded all converse, except with their keeper." 

Each variety of human being has its own besetting foible. As a 
man of great executive force is apt to be cruelh^ reckless of others' 
woe, so a person of scholarly habits and philaf^throjiic character is 
generally too reluctant to be the instrument of iiiflicting pain, even 
when justice, necessity, and mercy, all unite to demand it at his 
hands. I observe, therefore, with pleasure, in the voluminous cor- 
respondence relating to this affair, that Governor Jefferson rose 
superior to the natural and usual infirmity of men of his tempera- 
ment, and went heart and hand with his legal advisers. He put 
those men in irons, and immured them in a dungeon. In those 
days, too (Howard was only just beginning his jail-tours then), a dun- 



236 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK. 

geon ivas a dungeon. It was rotten straw, foul air, darkness, under- 
ground cliill, and every thing that was most dismal and repulsive. 
A hundred years ago the Christian religion was just struggling into 
existence.y,If*had not yet acquired force enough to purify the pub- 
lic jails of re'mote Virginia. But Jefferson, philanthvopisfc as he 
was, and, indeed, because he was a philanthropist, adhered firmly 
to the sj^stem of retaliation ; perceiving, as he told General Wash- 
ington, that retaliation in this instance was only a more far-reaching 
kind of mercy. 

General Phillips, that "proudest man of the proudest nation on 
earth," prisoner of war in a pleasant mansion near Monticello, sent a 
vigorous, though moderate and respectful, remonstrance to Governor 
JeiFerson. His chief point was, that Hamilton having capitulated, 
it was a breach of faith on the part of Virginia to treat him other- 
wise than as a prisoner of war. The governor ransacked authorities, 
but found nothing to justify this view. It occurred to hira, however, 
that militaiy usage, not yet embodied in law, might have estab- 
lished the principle; and he therefore, with the consent of his coun- 
cil, referred the matter to the decision of General Washington. " I 
have the highest idea," he wrote to the general, " of tliose contracts 
which take place between nation and nation at war, and would be 
the last on earth to do any thing in violation of them ; " and " my 
own anxiety under a charge of violation of national faith by the exe- 
cutive of this Commonwealth will, I hope, apologize for my adding 
this to the many troubles with which I know you to be burdened." 
The commander-in-chief, after much reflection, and consultation 
with military men, thought it best, upon the whole, that Hamilton 
and his companions should have the benefit of the doubt. Their 
shackles were, therefore, taken off, and they were finally admitted 
to parole. 

Not the less were the governor and council resolved to adhere to 
the system of retaliation. A prison-ship, on the fell pattern of those 
used by the English in New York, was actually got ready, and the 
exchange of prisoners was stopped between Virginia and New York. 
" Humane conduct on our part," wrote the governor, " was found to 
produce no effect: the contrary was therefore to be tried. If it 
produces a proper lenity to our citizens in captivity, it will have the 
effect we meant : if it does not, we shall return a severity as terrible 
as universal Iron," he added, " will be retaliated by iron, 



JEFFEESON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 237 

but a great multiplication on distinguished objects ; prison-ships by 
prison-ships, and like for like in general." But happily Governor 
Jefferson, in November, 1779, received notification from head-quar- 
ters that the British generals, under the new commander, Sir Henry 
Clinton, had changed their system, and were treating prisoners of 
war with an approach to humanity. Virginians might be pardoned 
for thinking that the just, spirited, and firm conduct of their 
governor and council had had something to do with this change. 

Meanwhile the governor had trouble enough ^Vith the thousands 
of Burgoyne prisoners near his own home. Their thriving gardens, 
attractive as they might be to a visitor, could not retain them when 
there was a chance to escape ; and whenever there "was a British 
force operating in or near Virginia, no one could say, of a squad of 
soldiers on the tramp, whetlier they were deserters from that force, 
or prisoners escaped from Albemarle. '' Four hundred desertions in 
the last fortnigli»t,''' wrote Colonel Bland in Jul}', 1779; and he had 
reason to believe, " with the connivance of some of the officers." 
This news was not calculated to soothe the mind of the new 
governor. 

But the grand object of Mr. Jefferson's solicitude, during the first 
summer of his administration, was to enable the gallant Colonel 
Clarke to make the most of his commanding position in the Far 
West. The burning desire of that hero's heart was to capture De- 
troit, the seat of the enemy's power in the Indian country, and, as 
Governor Jefferson described it, " an uneasy thorn in our side." A 
great host of friendly Indians were assembled at Vincennes ; and all 
was ready for the expedition, except the more costly supplies, and 
the regiment or- two of white troops needful for the onset. It lay 
heavy on the governor's mind, during the whole period of his service, 
that he could never quite spare them. Several times he thought he 
had both men and money enough. But, just as the troops were 
ready to march, an exigency would occur so dire, so pi-essing, that he 
was compelled to order them elsewhere. Thus Detroit remained in 
the hands of the enemy ; remained a very uneasy thorn in the side 
of Washington, the United States, the Federal party, until John 
Jay extracted it by treaty in 1794. Governor Jefferson, unable to 
get Detroit, resolved to secure what Colonel Clarke had already 
conquered. A wild delusion prevailed just then, that peace was at 
hand through the mediation of Spain ; and, supposing that each 



238 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFERSON. 

belligerent would retain what he actually held at the moment of 
treating, the governor ordered Colonel Clarke to build certain forts 
in the western country, particularly one on the Mississippi, at the 
southern boundary of Virginia, which would make good Virginia's 
ancient claim to extend westward as far as the Great River. 
Colonel Clarke, who was a surveyor by profession, — resembling in 
this as in other respects Jefferson's own father, — built the fort, and 
named it Fort Jefferson. 

This year, 1779, the last of Williamsburg's serving as the capital 
of Virginia, was the last of Jefferson's residence near William and 
Mary College, in which he had been educated. Being now elected 
a college visitor, he endeavored, amid the bustle and anxieties of 
war, to lop off some of the dead branches that hindered, as he 
thought, its useful operation. He caused the grammar-school to 
be abolished, and the two professorships of divinity and Hebrew to 
be suppressed. In place of these he made provision for the instruc- 
tion of the students in chemistry, natural history, anatomy, medi- 
cine, law, modern languages, the fine arts, natural justice, and the 
laws of nations. In the spring of 1780, Richmond, a village then 
of nine hundred white inhabitants, peculiarly defenceless and unpro- 
vided, became the capital of Virginia ; the government finding 
shelter — and little more than shelter — in extemporized wooden 
structures. 

The dream of peace was rudely dispelled. About the date of 
this removal to Richmond, April 1, 1780, the stern and bitter trial 
of Virginia and her governor began. By the time he had arranged 
his new pigeon-holes at Richmond, came a private letter from Madi- 
son, then in Congress, which must have appalled timid minds. The 
army under Washington, Mr. Madison said, was on the verge of 
dissolution, being short of bread and nearly out of meat ; the treas- 
ury empty, and the public credit gone ; the currency nearly worth- 
less, and no visible means of restoring it ; the States pulling one 
way, and Congress another; and every thing in extremity. This 
was, indeed, the period of profoundest gloom, — the black hour 
before the dawn. It was the time when Thomas Paine, whose pen, 
during the Revolution, was equal to a thousand men in the field, 
drew the year's salary due him as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assem- 
bly, and began with it a private subscription in aid of the • gasping 
cause, which had an effect rivalling in importance a new number of 



JEFFEESON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 239 

"The Crisis." The sum was but five hundred paper dollars, it is 
true ; but it was all he had, and it kindled the patriotism of men 
who had more. 

By the time Governor Jefferson had docketed Mr. Madison's 
letter, in the first week of April, 1780, arrived news that a British 
fleet and army were investing Charleston. News followed, six weeks 
after, that the city was taken. South Carolina helpless, and a British 
army free to move northward over North Carolina into Virginia, 
unless a half-armed militia could stop it. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 



VIBGINIA RAVAGED. 



To the governor of Virginia, this whole year, 1780, and half the 
next, was a period of the most rending anxiety, and of exertion the 
most intense and constant. With four thousand five hundred Vir- 
ginians already in the army, we see him stimulating the recruiting 
system in each county, writing letters, public and private, to county 
members and magnates, urging them to utilize the dying currency, 
and get out the last man witli the last dollar, while it still had a 
semblance of* value. He arranged, early in the campaign, three 
lines of express-riders, — one to General Washington, one to Hamp- 
ton Roads, one to the head-quarters of the army of the South, — so 
that, at a crisis, he hoped to be able to get and send news at the 
rate of one hundred and twenty miles in a day and niglit. Still 
further to guard against surprise, he despatched General Nelson on 
a tour of the eastern counties, requesting him to get the county 
lieutenants together, and concert a plan of action in case of another 
descent of the enemy from the oceans. At first it was an agonizing 
question, to which quarter Virginia should send her levies. Three 
letters from the Committee of Congress at head-quarters lay upon his 
desk at once, all asking for men and means; but early in July, Gene- 
ral Gates arrived at Richmond, on his way to take the command in 
the South; and, for the next six weeks, every man, horse, wagon, gun, 
bayonet, axe, cartridge-box, shoe, belt, saddle, blanket, tent, and 
coin, which Governor Jefferson could beg, buy, borrow, or get made, 
was hurried away to General Gates's head-quarters in North Caro- 
lina. Some Virginians saw with dismay the governor pouring into 
General Gates's camp the whole of Virginia's means of defence. 
His answer then and ever after was, that Virginia's single chance 
of escaping devastation by Coruwallis's army lay in strengthening 
240 



VIRGINIA EAVAGED. 241 

Gates. If Gates and his army did not stop and hurl back upon 
Charleston the British forces, nothing could keep them out of 
Virginia. 

For the first time in her history, Virginia became a manufac- 
turing State. '' Our smiths," wrote the governor, August 4, " are 
making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General Gates," 
— turning out twenty a day; "and we are endeavoring to get bay- 
onet-belts made," — though leather was so scarce that people stole 
the flaps of cartouch-boxes from the wagons to mend their shoes 
with. The governor sent messengers all over the State to pick up 
little lots of material, such as duck and leather. And, when he had 
accumulated supplies, he was at his wit's end for wagons in which 
to transport them. Nearly a quarter of a century had elapsed since 
Braddock had found wagons so scarce in Virginia and Maryland ; and 
Governor Jefiferson, since he had no money in his treasury to hire or 
buy them, found them scarcer still. In this extremity he was 
obliged to impress wagons, not sparing his own. His principle was, 
to leave on every farm the horses and vehicles absolutely necessary 
to secure the ripening crops, and take all the rest for the public ser- 
vice. This he did upon his own farms in Albemarle. It is inter- 
esting to note, that, in tlie crisis of the campaign, the governor was 
sending about to try and find, for the use of General Gates, a copy 
of the old map of Virginia, made when he was a child, by Professor 
Fry and his own father. The ladies, this summer, were contribut- 
ing the costly trifles of their jewel-drawers to the cause, besides 
huge packets of the paper-money of the period. Mrs. Jefferson, 
the gentle wife of the governor, was active in the work. Among the 
Gates papers in the priceless collection of the New- York Historical 
Society, is a letter in the neatest, firmest hand, which she wrote to a 
friend at this time, — the only scrap of her writing, perhaps, that has 
escaped the privacy in which her life was passed : — 

Richmond, Aug. 8, 1780. 
Mrs. Washington has done me the honor of communicating the 
enclosed proposition of our sisters of Pennsylvania, and of informing 
me that the same grateful sentiments are displaying themselves in 
Maryland. Justified by the sanction of her letter in handing for- 
ward the scheme, I undertake with cheerfulness the duty of furnish- 
ing to my country-women an opportunity of proving that they also 
16 



242 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth to it. I can- 
not do more for its promotion than by enclosing to j^ou a number of 
the papers, to be distributed to such counties as are convenient to 
you, and to such persons in them as you think proper. 

I have the honor to be, with sentiments of the most perfect esteem 
and respect, madam, 

Your most obedient and most humble servant, 

Martha Jeffersoic. 

The results of this appeal, I fear, were not brilliant ; and yet it 
had results. Doubtless a hard-pressed treasurer valued Mrs. Sarah 
Gary's gold watch-chain, which "cost £7 sterling," or Mrs. Ambler's 
" five gold rings," or Mrs. Griffin's " ten half-joes," or Mrs. Ramsay's 
collectioft of " one half-joe, three guineas, three pistareens, one bit," 
more highly than the same lady's sounding collection of four bundles 
of paper money, containing in all seventy-five thousand five hun- 
dred and eighteen dollars and one-third. This delusive sum was 
not altogether to be despised. It would buy one or two blankets, or 
half a dozen pairs of tolerable marching-shoes. 

These efforts were in vain. In the midst of the governor's 
endeavors, while he was in the very act of hurrying away re-enforce- 
ments and stores to the scene of action, occurred (August 16, 1780) 
the disastrous defeat of Gates at Camden. It was a woful stroke. 
In an hour — such a destroyer is war — all that Virginia and the 
whole Confederacy could accumulate of men, horses, and material, in 
two months of intensest exertion, was scattered and gone. Those 
wagons so painfully got together, to the number of one hundred and 
thirty, were all lost, — one of Jefferson's among the rest. In this sad 
extremity, the governor's first thought was to gather precise and 
full information of the cause and extent of the disaster, and transmit 
the same to General Washington; his second, to raise and equip new 
levies (though " without any money in the treasury, or hope of any 
till October "), and do whatever else was possible to enable General 
Gates to make a new stand. For the lost wagons, he tried to substi- 
tute barges, in which to float provisions down the streams towards 
General Gates's camp ; but he was obliged to become personally 
responsible for the cost of their construction. It marks the confu- 
sion of the time, that, when a month had elapsed after the Camden 
defeat, he was still ignorant of the fate of his own wagoner and 



VIRGINIA RAVAGED. 243 

horses. A wagon-master from the fatal field told liim that a brigade 
quartermaster, at the moment of panic, cut one of his best horses 
from the harness, and rode av\-ay on him ; and that his negro 
wagoner, Phil, lame in one arm and leg, was seen loosening another 
horse for the same laudable purpose of saving himself for further 
service. As the public money was carried in the governor's wagon, 
it is also to be presumed he never saw it again. 

Camden is about one hundred and fifty miles from the Virginia 
line ; and yet several months passed before a soldier of the victorious 
army trod Virginia soil. The enterprising and resolute yeomanry 
of North Carolina held them in check, and even compelled a retreat 
into South Carolina. It was from another quarter that Virginia was 
menaced next. 

It was the 22d of October, 1780. Amid the universal horror and 
consternation caused by Arnold's defection, the governor of Virginia 
was still sending forward from everj'' county all the men it could 
spare to General Gates, except a force which he still hoped to 
reserve for Colonel Clarke's project against Detroit. Droves of 
cattle were on the southern road; the smiths were still working on 
the axes, producing twenty a day; agents were out buying the newly- 
harvested corn on the credit of the State ; men were ranging the 
western counties for a hundred more wagons, all for the new army 
forming under Gates in North Carolina, — when news came that a 
British fleet of sixty vessels had entered Hampton Eoads, and were 
landing troops near Portsmouth ! Jefferson's three lines of express- 
riders stood him in good stead now ; for against such a force — a 
dozen armed vessels and three thousand regular troops of all arms — - 
there was nothing in Virginia that could stand an hour; and he could 
do little more than send the information to Washington and Gafes. 
Such militia as were left and had arms were instantly diverted to 
this new danger; but they could 'do nothing but make a show of 
resistance. To General Gates the governor could now only forward 
an idea : " Would it not be worth while to send out a swift boat from 
some of the inlets of North Carolina to notify the French admiral 
that his enemies are in a net, if he has leisure to close the mouth of 
it?" 

"His enemies!" Mr. Jefferson soon learned whose enemies 
these new-comers were, and what t\\&j had come to Virginia for. 
When they had ♦been a week at Portsmouth, doing nothing, particu- 



244 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIT. 

lav, a suspicious character was arrested on the road leading south- 
ward. While protesting his willingness to be searched, he was seen 
to put something into his mouth. Tobacco, perhaps? But the 
Virginia militia-men, experienced tobacco-chewers, did not recognize 
the correct swing of the arm in the motion made by this unknown ; 
and, taking the liberty to examine his mouth, they extracted there- 
from a remarkable quid, — a neat little roll of the size of a goose-quill, 
covered with goldbeater's-skin, and nicely tied at each end. It 
proved to be a letter from General Leslie, the commander of the 
expedition, to Lord Cornwallis : " My Lord, I have been here near a 
week, establishing a post, • I wrote to you to Charleston and by 
another messenger by land. I cannot hear for a certainty where 
you are. I wait your orders. The bearer is to be handsomely 
rewarded, if he brings me any note or mark from your lordship. 
A. L." 

This great armament, then, had come to co-operate with Corn- 
wallis in the subjection of Virginia. The design was frustrated by 
the activity and valor of the North-Carolina militia in annoying and 
detaining Cornwallis. Leslie waited a month ; at the expiration of 
which he put to sea again with all his ships and all his men. Dur- 
ing his stay, the British prisoners in Albemarle escaped in such 
numbers, that the governor deemed it best to march them into 
Maryland. And none too soon! If they had remained in Albe- 
marle through the winter, every man of them would have gone to 
swell the British army when it. made its last stand at Yorktown ; 
for Cornwallis, in the spring, could have struck the camp which they 
had made so inviting with gardens and shrubbery. To the last 
week of their stay, the agreeable relations between some of the 
officers and Governor Jefferson continued. To a young German 
lieutenant of scientific tastes, who had poured forth fervent thanks- 
givings for Mr. Jefferson's kindness, the governor sent an amiable 
reply, making light of the services he had been able to render, and 
suggesting to his young friend to resume philosophy when the war 
should be over, and, settling in America, acquire a fame "founded 
on the happiness, and not on the calamities, of human nature." 
Beally, these were fortunate prisoners. The ofScers had bought for 
their pleasure such a large number of the superior Virginia horses, 
that, upon their going away, it became a serious question whether 
they ought to be allowed to take the animals out of a State so 



VIEGINIA RAVAGED. 245 

terribly in want of them ; and Governor Jefferson referred tliis point 
also to General Washington's decision. 

The month of December, 1780, was a breathing-time to the 
Virginians. The governor employed it chiefly in pushing measures 
in aid of Colonel Clarke's design against Detroit. The British were 
again powerful in the Far "West. Certain news came, that, in the 
spring, two thousand Indians and English would ravage the fron- 
tiers, unless employment could be found for them nearer home ; and 
it was only too probable that the scene of the nest regular campaign . 
would be Virginia. Clarke was himself in Richmond for the pur- 
pose of urging and organizing the expedition, and was waiting, as 
the 3'ear 1780 drew to a close, the final answer of General Washing- 
ton to the governor's strong recommendation of the scheme. The 
general's consent and warm approval were given in due tim3; but, 
before his letter reached E-ichmond, events again interposed their 
irresistible fiat. 

On Sunday, the last day of the year 1780, at eight in the morn- 
ing, Jefferson received intelligence that a fleet of twenty-seven sail 
had entered Chesapeake Bay the day before. The messenger must 
have ridden hard, the distance in a straight line between Richmond 
and Old Point Comfort being not less than a hundred and twenty 
miles; and he had not waited long enough to learn what flag the 
vessels bore, nor whether they were bound up the bay or into the 
James. All the rulers of Virginia were in Richmond at the moment ; 
for the legislature was in session, within two days of its adjournment. 
General Nelson of the State militia and the heroic Clarke were 
there; and Baron Steuben, who had recently come to assist in the 
defence of the State, was not far off. But neither soldier nor 
civilian could assist an anxious governor in determining the char- 
acter of the new arrival. Could it be Leslie back again? Might it 
not be the long-wished-for French fleet ? Was it that mysterious 
expedition fitting out lately in New York, destined, as it was given 
out, for some Southern port, of which General Washington, three 
weeks before, had sent his usual circular of notification to the gov- 
ernors of States ? No one could tell. And if the fleet should prove to 
be hostile, would the commanding general be content with merely 
ravaging the shores of the lower country, like his. two predecessors, 
or push for regions which no enemy had yet despoiled? Which 
river would he ascend, — the York, the James, the Potomac, the 



246 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Patapsco? What town would he first plunder, — Alexandria, Bal- 
timore, Williamsburg, Petersburg, or Eichraond ? 

Amid all this doubt, the governor could only despatch General 
Nelson, with full powers, to the mouth of the James, that he might 
be near the scene of his duties in case it were necessary to call out 
the militia. Richmond has known some anxious Sundays since, 
but perhaps few more distressing than this ; for the whole day 
passed without bringing further intelligence. Monday came and 
went; but not a 'messenger from the lower country arrived. On 
Tuesday morning, 'at ten, the suspense was at an end. Word 
came that the fleet was British, not French, and that it had entered 
the James, not gone up Chesapeake Bay. Instantly the governor 
signed orders, calling out half the militia of the region menaced, and 
a third of the militia of the counties adjacent to it, — four thousand 
seven hundred men in all, — and intrusted the orders to the county 
members just departing for their homes. That done, he directed 
the removal of public property to Westham, a village just above the 
rapids which close the navigation of the James at Kichmond. 

The next evening, Wednesday, January 3, the governor learned 
that the enemy's fleet of light vessels had come to anchor near 
Jamestown, the point where the river is only seven miles from 
Williamsburg. Then all thought the enemy's first object must be 
the ancient capital. But it was not. On Thursday morning, two 
hours before the dawn, came intelligence that the fleet, favored by 
wind and tide, had swept on up the broad James to a landing below 
where the Appomattox enters it. There was still, therefore, some 
doubt whether Eichmond or Petersburg was to be visited ; but the 
governor, who had now learned that " the parricide Arnold " was the 
commander of the expedition, called out all the militia of that part 
of the State. At five that afternoon all doubt was dispelled by a 
despatch which informed the governor that the foe had landed troops 
at Westover, twenty-five miles distant. 

In this emergency Governor Jeff'erson found himself alone.- Not 
a member of the Council or of the Assembly remained in Richmond 
to aid him, for all had gone to place their families in safety, or were 
absent on public duty. He sent his own family — wife and three 
children, the youngest two months old — to the house of a relative at 
Tuckahoe, thirteen miles above the town. There were two hundred 
militia of the neighborhood near at hand; and stronger parties were 



VIRGINIA BAVAGED. 247 

gathering at various points under Steuben, Clarke, Nelson, and 
others ; but nowhere in Virginia was there yet an armed body capa- 
ble of holding in check a regiment of regular troops led by an 
Arnold. 

The governor mounted his horse, and took command of the situa- 
tion. His first orders were to stop transporting stores to Westham, 
and simply get every thing across the river, or into the river, any- 
where so that Arnold could not easily reach it. Some hours he 
spent in superintending and urging on this worlj, first at Richmond, 
later at Westham, reaching Tuckahoe, where his family were, at one 
in the morning. There he remained long enough to assist them 
across the river, and see them safely on their way to a securer 
refuge, eight miles above; and then he galloped back along the 
James to a point opposite Westham, where, at daylight, he resumed 
his superintendence of the transfer of the public property. At full 
speed, on the same tired, unfed horse, he continued his ride towards 
Manchester, then a small village, opposite Richmond. Before he 
reached it, his horse sank under him exhausted, and he was obliged 
to leave the animal dying in the road. With saddle and bridle on 
his own back, he hurried on to the next farm-house for another 
horse. He could only borrow there a colt not yet broken, iipon 
which he continued his journey; until, coming in sight of Rich- 
mond, he discovered the foe already in possession. After doing the 
little that was possible for the security of the public stores at 
Manchester, he rode away to the head-quarters of Baron Steuben, a 
few miles ofi", for consultation with the only educated soldier within 
his reach. 

In war every thing, even the elements, seem sometimes to favor 
audacity. Arnold only remained in Richmond twenty-three hours ; 
but so promptly had the governor acted, and so well was he seconded 
by the county militia and their ofiicers, that Arnold only escaped 
with his nine hundred men through a timely change in the wind, 
which bore him down the river with the extraordinary swiftness of 
his ascent. In five days from the first summons, twenty-five hun- 
dred militia were on the traitor's path, and hundreds more coming 
in every hour ; but the breeze wafted him away from them down the 
James, with the loss of thirty of his men, laid low by a whiff of mus- 
ketry from a party of militia under Colonel Clarke. During the 
brief staj^ of the enemy near Richmond, they burned a cannon foun- 



248 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

dery, several of tlie public shanties, a few private houses, and a pro- 
digious quantity of tobacco, besides throwing into the canal five tons 
of powder, and spoiling three liundred muskets. 

After three days' absence from the capital, the governor returned, 
and affairs began to resume their usual train. For eightj'-four hours 
his home had been the saddle. Arnold went plundering on to the 
mouth of the James, where he intrenched himself in the camp 
abandoned a few weeks before by Leslie. 

A passionate desii."e pervaded the continent to have this traitor 
brought to justice; or, as Jefferson expressed it, "to drag him from 
those under whose wing he is now sheltered." When the governor 
learned the details of Arnold's retreat, he felt that a small band of 
cool, resolute men could have seized and carried him off; and he now 
proposed the scheme to an officer of militia. The men to aid him 
were drawn from the regiments of western Virginia, in whom the 
governor had " peculiar confidence." The band, he recommended, 
should be few in number, the smaller the better ; and he left it to the 
discretion of the chief whether they should enter Arnold's camp as 
friends, or lie in wait for him without. " I will undertake," he 
wrote, " if they are successful in bringing him off alive, that they 
shall receive five thousand guineas' reward among them ; and, to men 
formed for such an enterprise, it must be a great incitement to know 
that their names will be recorded with glory in history with those 
of Van Wart, Paulding, and Willianis." Arnold grew wary, how- 
ever, and could not be caught. 

From this time the civil government in Virginia was, in effect, 
almost suspended. The war was to be fought out upon Virginia 
soil and in Vii>ginia waters ; and it is an old saying, that, in the 
presence of contending armies, laws are silent. Arnold, Phillips, 
Cornwallis,Tarlton, Rochambeau, Greene, Steuben, Lafayette, Nelson, 
"Washington, are the names that figure in the history of Virginia 
during the next nine months. Arnold, re-enforced and superseded 
by Phillips, ravaged one portion of the State, except when checked 
by Steuben and Lafayette. Cornwallis and Tarlton, long retarded 
and eluded by Greene, swept over the border at last. Indians 
threatened the western counties; and fleets arrived, departed, con- 
tended, on the eastern shores. All that Virginia had of manhood, 
resources, credit, ability, was enlisted in the cause ; and so many 
men were in service during the planting season, that the governor 



VIRGINIA RAVAGED. 249 

feared there would not be food enough raised for the year's neces- 
sities. 

Jefferson, in the midst of this agonizing chaos, did whatever was 
possible to supply and re-enforce Greene, Steuben, Lafayette : the 
burden of his cry to Washington, to Congress, being always "the 
fatal want of arms." The need of arms became at length so press- 
ing, that, after "knocking at the door of Congress " by letter for 
many months, he requested Harrison, Speaker of the Assembly, to 
go to Philadelphia, and beg Congress in person, if they could not 
assign to Virginia a proper supply of arms, to at least repay Virginia 
the arms she had lent for the protection of the Carolinas. Power 
little short of absolute was conferred upon the governor by the 
legislature at one of its hurried spring sessions. He was authorized 
to call out the whole of the militia ; to impress all wagons, horses, 
food, clothing, accoutrements, negroes ; to arrest the disaffected and 
banish the disloyal. He was empowered, also, to emit the magnifi- 
cent sum of fifteen millions of dollars, in addition to the hundred 
and twenty millions previously issued in the same month, — the 
whole amount being worth then about twenty-seven thousand golden 
guineas. But all this availed little. Virginia wanted muskets, — 
wanted them, not merely for the great operations of the war, but for 
daily and nightly and hourly defence against predatory bands. 
Governor J effersou could not furnish them. 



CHAPTEE XXVIII. 

THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO. 

Four times in the spring of 18|"1 the legislature of Virginia 
were obliged to adjourn in haste, and fly before the coming or the 
menace of an enemy. First in January, when Arnold plundered 
the capital. Next in March, when every act was hurried through 
from fear of another interruption. Then in May, when an attack 
seemed so imminent, that the few members who had come together 
gave up trj^ing to legislate at E,ichmond, and separated to meet at 
Charlottesville, under the shadow of Monticello, little thinking that 
the storm of war was about to sweep over Albemarle also. 

Tlie day appointed for the assembling of the legislature at Char- 
lottesville was May 24. The governor's second term of service 
would expire on the 1st of June ; but, amid the hurry and alarm of 
the time, the Assembly had as yet found no opportunity to attend to 
an election. There was no quorum till the 28th, when a speaker 
was chosen ; but even then, such was the emergency, the House 
could not enter into the election of a governor. Cornwallis, with all 
his arm}^, was five days' march distant, and the State seemed to lie 
at his mercy. Not a boat could cross the bay nor descend the James 
without risk of capture by the enemy's smaller craft. The civil 
government seemed a nullity at such a moment ; and the governor, as 
the last hours of his term were gliding away, could only serve his 
State by explaining its situation to Congress and the commander-in- 
chief He felt that what Virginia needed then was a general, able, 
strong in the confidence of the people, acquainted with the State, 
one who would place himself in the centre of the crisis, rally around 
him every element of force Virginia possessed, and direct it upon the 
foe. He thought, moreover, that the seven thousand men of Corn- 
wallis must be the enemy's principal force ; and, under this impres- 
250 



THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO. 251 

sion, he wrote to General Washington on the 28th of May, while a 
small quorum of the legislature were choosing their speaker within 
sight of his house : " Were it possible for this circumstance to justify 
in Your Excellency a determination to lend us your personal aid, it 
is evident from the universal voice that the presence of their beloved 
countryman, whose talents have so long been successfully employed 
in establishing the freedom of kindred States, to whose person they 
have still flattered themselves they retained some right, and have 
ever looked upon as their dernier resort in distress, that your appear- 
ance among them, I say, would restore full confidence of salvation, 
and would render them equal to whatever is not impossible." 

The time had not yet come for Washington's appearance on this 
scene, though that time was not distant. The month of May ex- 
pired. Jefferson was out of office, and Virginia had no governor. 

The Speaker of the House, the President of the Council, and 
several members of both bodies, were his guests at Monticello, riding 
over from Charlottesville every afternoon after the business of the 
day was at an end. 

Just before sunrise, June 4, 1781, while as yet the inhabitants of 
Monticello slept, except, perhaps, the early-waking master of the 
mansion, a horseman rode at full speed up the mountain, and sprang, 
ifrom his foaming steed at the door of the house. He was a gentle- 
man of the neighborhood, named Jouitte, well known to Jefferson. 
He had been spending the evening before at a tavern in Louisa, 
twenty miles away, the county town of the next county eastward 
from Albemarle. 'An hour before midnight a body of British 
cavalry, two hundred and fifty in number, had galloped into the 
town, had come to a halt, dismounted, and proceeded to refresh man 
and beast with food and rest. Jouitte guessed that the object of 
such a band, so far from the actual seat of war, commanded, too, by 
the famous Tarlton, could be no other than the surprise of the 
governor and legislature of Virginia. He had his horse saddled ; 
and, while Tarlton and his men were enjoying their three hours' 
halt at Louisa, he had struck into an old, disused road, a short cut, 
and ridden with all speed towards Charlottesville to give the 
alarm ; making a slight detour on his way, to warn Mr. Jefferson 
and his friends at Monticello. He delivered his message there, and 
rode on to notify the rest of the members in the village. 

The family, we are told, breakfasted as usual ; after which, the 



252 LIFE OF THOINIAS JEFFEESON. 

/ 
guests rode away to Charlottesville, and the inmates of the house 

prepared for a journey. A carriage was made ready, and brought 
round to the door, in which Jefferson placed his most valued papers. 
He sent his best horse to be shod at a shop on the river's bank, a 
mile off. The two most trusted of the household servants gathered 
the plate and other things of value, and hid them under the floor of 
the front portico. All these things were done with a certain deliber- 
ation, because the family naturally concluded that Tarlton would 
first strike Charlottesville, which lay in plain sight from Monticello, 
and thus give them ample notice of his approach. But Tarlton, as 
he went thundering on towards the village, detached a troop to seize 
the governor, and hold Monticello as a lookout during his stay in the 
vicinity ; and hence, when Jefferson had been employed something 
less than two hours in sorting and packing his papers, an of&cer of 
militia came in, breathless, to say that British cavalry were coming 
■up the mountain. Jefferson had two law-pupils at the time, James 
Monroe, and another, whose name is not recorded. Monroe was in 
the field, of course, during these weeks of stress and ravage. To 
the other, Jefferson confided his family, directing him to take them 
to a friend's house some miles distant. He sent to the blacksmith's 
for his horse, ordering the servant to bring the animal to a spot 
between his own mountain and the next, which he could quickly 
reach by a by-road through the woods. Still he lingered a few 
minutes among his papers, wishing to give his servant time to get 
the horse to the designated place. He left his house at length, tele- 
scope in hand, light sword of the period at his side, and walked 
down through the forest to the valley between the two mountains, 
where he found his horse. Before mounting, he paused to listen. 
No sound was audible, except the musical din of a peaceful June 
morning in the primeval woods. No clang of accoutrements, nor 
tramp of armed men, nor distant thunder of a troop of horse. He 
went a little way up the next mountain to a rock, whence,, with the 
aid of his telescope, he could clearly see Charlottesville ; but there 
was no unusual stir in the streets. A false alarm perhaps ; and, so 
surmising, he resolved to go back to hi3 house, and finish the sorting 
of his papers, the accumulated treasure of the years that had past 
since the burning of the house in which he was born. He had gone 
some distaiice towards his homo, when he discovered that his sword 
had slipped from its scabbard, as he guessed, when he had stopped 



THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO. 253 

to get a rest for liis spyglass. He went back for it. Before leaving 
the rock, he took another peep through his glass at the village ; 
when, behold, it was all alive and swarming with troopers ! 

Then, for the first time, he mounted his horse, and took the road 
to follow his family, whom he rejoined before night. Tlie dropping / 
of his sword was a lucky event.) If he had gone back to the house, 
he might have fallen into the hands of the enemy ; for fchey entered 
just five minutes after he left it. The two friendly slaves who were 
hiding the family treasures, one in the cavity receiving, and the 
other on the portico handing down, were almost caught in-the act of 
stowing away the last article. They heard the sound of hoofs just 
in time for the one above to slam down the plank, shutting up the 
other in a dark, hot, and narrow hole, during the whole eighteen 
hours' stay of the troop. It proved to be a superfluous exertion of 
fortitude. Tarlton had given orders that nothing in the house should 
be injured or removed, and these orders were obeyed; except that 
some of the thirsty soldiers, after their thirty hours' gallop, helped 
themselves on the sly to some wine in the cellar. 

The fidelity of these two slaves, Martin and Csesar, during this 
time of trial, was always remembered by the family with gratitude 
and pride. , Martin, after shutting down the faithful Csesar with the 
treasures, remained standing upon the plank of the portico, where 
he received the captain of the troopers with dignified politeness. 
He conducted the officer over the house. When they reached the 
library, where Jefferson had, five minutes before, been at worki 
among his papers, this captain — McCleod by name, gentleman hj\ 
nature — locked the door ; and then, handing the key to Martin, said, 
in substance, "If any of the soldiers ask you for the key of this 
room, tell them / have it." One of the soldiers, to test Martin's 
mettle, put a pistol to his breast, and , -threatened to fire unless he 
told which way his master had gone./ "Fire away, then," replied 
the slave. Csesar, on his part, cramped and tortured as he was in j 
his black hole, made no movement, uttered no sound, during the whole | 
eighteen hours, — all the rest of that day and all the night follow- / 
ing. 

Down the James, a hundred miles or more, Jefferson possessed a 
plantation named Elk Hill, with mansion-house, negro quarter, 
extensive stables, herds of cattle, and growing crops. For ten days 
Cornwallis lived in this house, which had an elevated site, command- 



254 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

ing a view' of the whole estate. Jefferson himself has put upon 
record what his lordship did or permitted during his brief residence 
there. He destroyed all the growing crops of corn and tobacco ; he 
burned all the barns, filled with last year's product ; he took all the 
cattle, hogs, and sheep, for his army ; he appropriated all the service- 
able horses ; he cut the throats of the colts ; he burned all the fences;, 
he carried off twenty-seven slaves. With his usual exactness, Jeffer- 
son enumerates the items of his loss : nine horses, fifty-nine cattle, 
thirt}'- sheep, sixty hogs, seven hundred and eighty barrels of corn, 
nineteen hogsheads of tobacco, and two hundred and seventy-five 
acres of growing wheat and barley. Respecting the lost slaves he 
remarks, " Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done 
right ; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small- 
pox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp." A few of these 
slaves crawled home to recover or to die, and to give the fever to five 
who had not left the plantation. Cornwallis, he adds, " treated the 
rest of the neighborhood in much the same style, but not wi,th that 
spirit of total extermination with which he seemed to rage over my 
possessions,^^ 

For twelve days Virginia had no governor. If Tarlton had rid- 
den on that morning, without stopping for breakfast, he might have 
caught a quorum of the legislature in or near Charlottesville, and 
kept the State without a government for the rest of the campaign. 
It would have been no great harm ; for during the next five months, 
while the allied fleets and armies, and all the militia of Virginia that 
Jefferson had been able to arm, were cornering the marauder of the 
Southern States, there was little for civilians to do. Tarlton halted 
at the house of one of Jefferson's friends, who ordered breakfast for 
the colonel and his officers. But the privates were as hungry as 
their leaders, and devoured the food in the kitchen as fast as the 
cook could get it ready. Tarlton got no breakfast until he had 
placed a guard to protect the cook ; and this delay gave members 
time to come together at Charlottesville, and adjourn to meet, three 
days after, at Staunton, forty miles to the westward, on the safe side 
of the Blue Ridge. 

They met, accordingly, on the 7th of June. Discouraged at the 
aspect of affairs, soured and irritated by this fourth flight from the 
tramp of armed men, several of them were disposed to cast the 
blame of these invasions upon Governor Jefferson. One young 



THE ENEMY AT MOKTICELLO. 255 

member even said as much in the House, intimating that the gover- 
nor should have foreseen Arnold's coming, and called out the militia 
in time. We all know, from recent experience, that in war-time, 
when aifairs go ill in the field, the civil administration sinks in the 
esteem of the public ; and, indeed, we cannot wonder, that, amid 
the musket-famine of this terrible year, Virginians should bitterly 
regret the arms and accoutrements which the governor had sent 
down all the highways to Carolina, only to have them thrown away 
or captured at Camden and Guilford. Jefferson's friends courted, 
demanded, inquiry into his conduct, and insisted on having it set 
down as part of the business of the next session. 

Still the House refrained from the election of a governor. Some 
of the weaker members revived the stale device of naming Patrick 
Henry dictator, but again laid the project aside from fear of the dan- 
gers of imaginary patriot-assassins. " The very thought," as Jeffer- 
son wrote, " was treason against the people, was treason against 
mankind in general, as riveting forever the chains which bow down 
their necks, by giving to their oppressors a proof, which they would 
have trumpeted through the universe, of the imbecilit}' of republican 
government, in times of pressing danger, to shield them from harm." 
Jefferson had a far better device, one which gave the State a legiti- 
mate, a constitutional dictator. Several months before, he had 
resolved to decline serving a third term. In the belief, that, at such 
a crisis, the civil and military power should be wielded by the same 
hands, he induced his friends, who were a majority of the House, 
to give their votes to Thomas Nelson, commander-in-chief of the 
militia of the State, who was accordingly elected. 

General Nelson had been a main stay of Jefferson's administration, 
giving to it the support of his honored name, his militar}^ talents, 
and the credit of his vast estates. On his own personal security he 
had raised the greater part of a most timely loan of two millions of 
dollars, and advanced money to pay two Virginia regiments who 
would not march for the Southern army before their arrears were dis- 
charged. Governor Nelson took the field. He used without reserve 
the despotic powers with which he was intrusted; forcing men into 
the field, and impressing wagons, horses, negroes, supplies. He was 
in at the death of that foul, mean, and monstrous war. At York- 
town, his own mansion being within the enemy's lines, and occupied 
by British officers, he had the pleasure of sending cannon-balls 



256 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIST. 

crashing through his own dining-room, and breaking up festive par- 
ties making merry over his own wine. It was a happy stroke of 
good sense and good management in Jefferson to leave his office to 
such a successor ; because he appeased tlie dictator party by giving 
them a dictator, while assigning the sole duty of the time to one 
fitted to perform it. 

But General Nelson did not succeed in satisfying his countrymen, 
for whom he had sacrificed health and fortune. He was an unpop- 
ular governor ; for the Virginians did not enjoy a dictator when they 
had got one, and he could not long endure the opprobrium which 
the exercise of dictatorial power evoked. He threw up his office after 
holding it about six months ; and he, too, sought opportunity to 
defend his administration before the legislature. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

AT HOME AFTER THE TTAR. 

Public men were apparently more sensitive to criticism in the 
last century than in this. Junius has had many imitators : he 
founded a school ; he invented an industry; and the efforts of so 
many keen, reckless, ill-informed makers of antithesis and epigram 
have, perhaps, toughened the skins of public men, so that they now 
scarcely feel what would have made the statesmen of other days 
writhe in torment. It is an easy mode of producing an effect, this 
assailing the anxious and heavy-laden servants of the state. It was 
not difficult for a perfumed dandy in the amphitheatre, yawning at 
his ease, to find fault with the scarred and sweating gladiator fight- 
ing for life in the arena. It is not difficult to prepare in the secrecy 
of a garret a barbed and stinging bolt, and hurl it from the safe 
ambush of a pseudonyme at a distinguished combatant while he is 
absorbed in a contest with open foes. Poor Chatterton did it almost 
as well as Junius. At sixteen, an attorney's apprentice in far-off 
Bristol, singularly ignorant of the world, knowing nothing of poli- 
tics, he wrote fulminations against ministers, which Wilkes thought 
good enough to print in " The North Briton." So easy a trade is it 
to one who is ignorant enough and reckless enough. It were easy 
now to prove that Junius himself, who showed such skill in the arb 
of hiding, knew little more of the real- character, aims, and difficulties 
of the men whom he assailed, than the boy Chatterton. Happily 
the industry of so many anonymous and irresponsible cowards has 
lessened the power of the most envenomed criticism to injure or 
torture a good minister. Unhappily it has rendered the most just 
exposure of a bad one all but ineffectual. Truth and calumny we 
are apt alike to reject when they concern a public man. 

Jefferson was destined to suffer a very large share of ignorant 
17 267 



258 LIPE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

and reckless criticism, which he learned to endure with the imper- 
turbability of trained good sense. However, in 1781, he was not 
only a young man, but the world was j^ounger than it is now, not 
having outgrown the veneration once supposed to be due to all 
governors as such. It was a fearful thing still to censure the head 
of a state. One young man in the legislature of Virginia had pub- 
licly cast the blame of Virginia's desolation, during the first months 
of 1781, upon Governor Jefferson ; and in this censure some other 
members were known to acquiesce. It fills the reader of to-day 
with astonishment to observe, in Jefferson's correspondence, how 
deeply he took this to heart, and how long he brooded over it. 
Every man in a situation to judge his conduct had commended it. 
Washington, Gates, Greene, Lafa\'ette, Steuben, with whom he had 
co-operated in the defence of the State, had applauded his wisdom 
and promptitude ; and many of his fellow-citizens complained only 
that he had done too much. But the single word of censure out- 
weighed all applause. For many months he could not get over it. 
And, indeed, we must own that the censure was ill-timed, when his 
estate was overrun, his old servants destroyed, his family driven 
from their home, and himself pursued; all because he had been his 
country's conspicuously faithful servant in a perilous time. 

Such was his indignation, that he forswore public service forever. 
He would go back once to the legislature to meet his accusers face 
to face ; but, after that was done, nothing, no, nothing, should ever^ 
draw him from his books, his studies, his famih^, his gardens, his 
farms, again. He had had enough of public life. No slave, he 
wrote, was so wretched as "the minister of a commonwealth." He 
declared that the only reward he had ever desired for his thirteen 
years of public service was the good-will of his fellow-citizens, and 
he had not even obtained that ; nay, he had lost the little share of 
their esteem he had once enjoyed. Thus he exaggerated the 
injustice done him, and nursed, Achilles-like, his mortification. 

In August, Lafayette forwarded to him through the lines a letter 
from the President of Congress, telling him, that, six weeks before, 
Congress had again elected him to a foreign mission. But he 
would not be consoled. For once the healthy of his wife and the 
condition of his family (their infant child had died a few weeks 
before) were such as to permit their attempting the voyage together. 
He might have gone to Europe in 1781 ; he would have gone, but 



AT HOME AFTER THE "WAR. 259 

for tliis slight show of legislative censure. " I lose an opportu- 
nity," he wrote to Lafayette, " the only one I ever had, and perhaps 
ever shall have, of combining public service with private gratifica- 
tion ; of seeing countries whose improvements in science, in arts, in 
civilization, it has been my fortune to admire at a distance, but 
never to see, and at the same time of lending some aid to a cause 
which has been handed on from its first organization to its present 
stage by every efi^ort of which my poor faculties were capable. 
These, however, have not been such as to give satisfaction to some 
of my countrymen; and it has become necessary for me to remain in 
the State till a later period in the present year than is consistent 
with an acceptance of what has been offered me." 

Before the legislature met again, the winter of Virginia's discon- 
tent was made glorious summer by the surrender of Cornwallis at 
Yorktown. All thought of censure was swallowed up in that stupen- 
dous joy. December 19, 1781, exactly a month after the surrender, 
Jefferson, occupying his ancestral seat as member for Albemarle, — 
to which he had been re-elected without one dissentient vote, — 
rose in his place, reminded the House of the intimated censure of 
the last session, and said he was ready to meet and answer any 
charges that might be brought against him. No one responded. 
His accuser was absent. There was silence in the chamber. After 
a pause, a member rose, and offered a resolution thanking him for 
his '•' impartial, upright, and attentive administration," which 
passed both Council and Assembly unanimously. 

Even this did not heal the wound. As he refrained from attend- 
ing the spring session of the legislature, James Monroe wrote to 
him a letter of remonstrance, telling him that the public remarked 
his absence, and were disposed to blame him for withholding his help 
at so difficult a time. He answered, that, before announcing his 
determination to retire from public life, he had examined well his 
heart, to learn whether any lurking particle of political ambition 
remained in it to make him uneasy in a private station. " I became 
satisfied," he continued, " that every fibre of that passion was 
thoroughly eradicated." He thought, too, that thirteen years of 
public service had given him a right now to withdraw, and devote 
his energies to the care and education of the two families dependent 
upon him, and the restoration of estates impaired by neglect or laid 
waste by war. Nor could he forget the wrong done him in the As- 



260 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOX. 

semUj. "I felt," he wrote, "that these injuries, for such they have 
since been aclinowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit ivhich 
will only he mired hy the aU-heallng graveP For tliese and other 
reasons, he held to his purpose to withdraw from all participation in 
public affairs, and dedicate the whole residue of his life to the edu- 
cation of his children, the culture of his lands, and the sweet toils 
of the library. He. concluded by inviting his 3'oung friend to visit 
him at Monticello. " You will find me busy/' he said, '' but in 
lighter occupations." 

Yes, he was busy ; but few persons who look over the work he was 
then doing regard it as a very light occupation. The French 
government had instructed its minister at Philadelphia to gather and 
transmit to Paris information respecting the States of the American 
Confederacy ; and the secretary of legation had sent Mr. Jefferson 
a list of questions to answer concerning Virginia. From childhood 
he had observed nature in his native land with the curiosity of an 
intelligent and sympathetic mind; and in his maturer age, even in 
the busiest and most anxious times, he had been ever a student, an 
inquirer, a collector. All the stores of knowledge accumulated in so 
many years he now poured upon paper, and interspersed subtle and 
curious essays upon points of natural history, geography, morals, 
politics, and literature. M. de Marbois must have been astonished 
to receive from him, not a series of short, dry answers to official 
questions, but a volume, teeming with suggestive fact and thought, 
warm with humane sentiment, and couched, in the fluent language 
natural to a sanguine and glowing mind. It is in this work that 
the chapter occurs which gave so many powerful texts to our a o bl o 
Abolitionists during their eighty years' war with slavery: — 

" The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual 
exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting des- 
potism, on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. 
Our children see this, and learn to imitate it ; for man is an imita- 
tive animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. 
From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees 
others do. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the linea- 
ments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, 
gives a loose to the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, 
and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with 



AT HOME AFTER THE WAK. 261 

odious peculiarities. That man must be a prodigy who can retain 
his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . .11 
tremble for my country when I reflect that God is justj that his 
justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbefs, nature, and 
natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an ex- 
change of situations, is among, possible events ; that it may become 
probable by supernatural interference) The Almighty has no attri- 
bute which can take side with us in such a contest." 

At the close of the war, then, Jeiferson supposed his public life 
ended. He was sure of it. He had publicly said so. Monroe had 
remonstrated with him ; Madison had remonstrated ; his old constit- 
uents and Congress both solicited his services ; but he could not be 
lured again from his pleasant mountain home and its delicious duties 
into the arena of public strife, whence he had but lately issued, 
wounded and sore. I suppose he was wrong in this ; for if he, with 
his ample fortune, his fine endowments, his health, his knowledge, 
and his culture, was not bound to render some service to Virginia in 
1782, of whom could public service be reasonably demanded? 

It was a delightful dream while it lasted, that of spending a long 
life in the Garden of Virginia, with an adored wife, troops of affec- 
tionate children, and an ever-growing library. We have a glimpse 
of him there in the spring of 1782, when he was visited by one of 
the officers of the French army, Major-General the Marquis de 
Chastellux. During this year, while the negotiations for peace were 
lingering, the French officers were much in American society, mak- 
ing an impress upon manners and character that is not yet obliter- 
ated. Americans were peculiarly susceptible then to the influence 
of men whose demeanor and tone were in such agreeable contrast to 
those of the English. The French were exceedingly beloved at the 
time; not the officers only, but the men as well; for had they nof 
marched through the country without burning a rail, without touch- 
ing an apple in an orchard, without ogling a girl by the roadside? 

The influence of the French officers upon the young gentlemen of 
the United States was not an unmixed good. It was from them 
that the American of eighty years ago caught the ridiculous affecta- 
tion of fighting duels, which raged like a mania from 1790 to 1804. 
The French nobleman of the old school had also acquired an art, 
which men of our race never attain, the art of making sensual vice 



262 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

seem elegant and becoming. \ Anglo-Saxons are only respectable 
wben tbey are strictly virtuous. "^ It has not been given to us to lie 
with grac-e, and sin with dignity. We are nothing if not moral. 
And, doubtless, if a man permits himself to conduct his life on an. 
animal basis, it is honester in him, it is better for others, for him to 
appear the beast he is. The dissoluteness of the English officers at 
Philadelphia and New York, being open and offensive, was not cal- 
culated to make American youth cast aside the lessons of purity 
which they had learned in their clean and honorable homes. Dash- 
ing down Chestnut Street in a curricle, with a brazen hussy by your 
side, is not as jjretty a feat as carrying on what was styled " an in- 
trigue," in an elegant house. It was these French officers who 
infected many American youths, besides Hamilton and Burr anq 
their young friends, with the most erroneous and pernicious ideatha^ 
ever deluded youth, — that it is but a trifling, if not a becoming, 
lapse to be unchaste. 

Jefferson, who had the happy art of getting the good, and letting 
alone the evil, of whatever he encountered on his way througli life, 
was strongly drawn to this Marquis de Chastellux, a man of mature 
age, of some note in literature, a member of the Academy, and full 
of the peculiar spirit of his class and time. Jefferson had invited 
him to visit Monticello. On an afternoon in the first week of May, 
1782, behold the marquis and his three friends — a cavalcade of four 
gentlemen, six mounted servants, and a led horse — winding up the 
LittIe.Mount, and coming in sight of the "rather elegant," unfin- 
ished Italian villa on its summit. I am afraid Mrs. Jefferson saw 
this brave company dismount with some dismay, for she was not in a 
condition to entertain strangers. They, however, were well pleased 
to see a bit of Europe in those western wilds. "Mr. Jefterson," 
wrote the marquis, "is the first American who has consulted the 
fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather; " 
which was a sweeping statement, though not far from the truth. 
Upon entering, he met the master of the house, — ".a man not yet 
forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance ; " " an Ameri- 
can, who, without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a 
musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natu- 
ral philosopher, legislator, and statesman;" "a philosopher in vol- 
untary retirement from the world and public business," because 
"the minds of his countrymen are not yet in a condition either to 



HOME AFTER THE WAE. 263 

bear the light or to suffer contradiction ; " blessed with " a mild and 
amiable wife, and charming children of whose education he himself 
takes charge." Mr. Jefferson, he adds, received his invited guest 
without any show of cordiality, even with something like coldness ; 
but, before they had conversed two hours, they were as intimate as 
if they had passed their whole lives together. During four days 
the joy of their intercourse never lessened ; for their conversation, 
" always varied and interesting, was supported by that sweet satis- 
faction experienced by two persons, who, in communicating their 
sentiments and opinions, are invariably in unison, and who under- 
stand one another at the first hint." 

It so chanced that the Frenchman was a lover of Ossian. "I 
recollect with pleasure," he tells us, "that, as we were conversing 
one evening over a bowl of punch, after Mrs. Jefferson had retired, 
our conversation turned on the poems of Ossian, . It was a spark of 
electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other. We recol- 
lected the passages in those sublime poems which had particularly 
struck us, and entertained with them my fellow-travellers, who for- 
tunately knew English well. In our enthusiasm the book was sent 
for, and placed near the bowl, where, by their mutual aid, the night 
advanced imperceptibly upon us. Sometimes natural philosophy, at 
others politics or the arts, were the topics of our conversation ; for 
no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson, and it seemed as if from his 
youth he had placed his mind, as he had done his house, on an ele- 
vated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe." 

Sometimes he rambled with his guests about the grounds, show- 
ing them his little herd of deer, a score in number. " He amuses 
himself by feeding them with Indian com, of which they are very 
fond, and which they eat out of his hand. I followed him one 
evening into a deep valley, where they are accustomed to assemble 
towards the close of the day, and saw them walk, run, and bound ; " 
but neither guest nor host could decide upon the family to which 
they belonged. In other branches of natural science the marquis 
found Mr. Jefferson more proficient, particularly in meteorology- 
He had made, in conjunction with Professor Madison of William 
and Mary, a series of observations of the ruling winds at Williams- 
burg and at Monticello, and discovered, that, while the north-east 
wind had blown one hundred and twenty-seven times at Willidms- 
burg, it had blown but thirty-two times at Monticello. The four 



264 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

days passed like four minutes, says the marquis. The party of 
Frenchmen continued their journey towards the Natural Bridge, on 
land belonging to their host, eighty miles distant. Mr. Jefferson 
would have gone with them : " but his wife being expected every 
moment to lie in, as he is as good a husband as he is an excellent 
philosopher and virtuous citizen, he onlj^ acted as my guide for about 
sixteen miles, to the passage of the little River Mechinn, where we 
parted, and, I j)resume to flatter myself, with mutual regret." 

He might flatter himself so far. Mr. Jefferson was extremely 
pleased with him ; and this was the beginning of that fondness for 
the French people which he carried with him through the rest of 
his life. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

DEATH OF MRS. JEFFERSON.. 

Before the Marquis deChastellux had been gone from Monticello 
many hours, the sixth child of Thomas and Martha Jeiferson was 
born, making the number of their living children three. It was 
death to the mother. She lingered four months, keeping her 
husband and all the household in what he termed " dreadful sus- 
pense." He took his turn with his sister and with her sister in 
sitting up at night. With his own hands he administered her 
medicines and her drinks. For four months he was either at her 
bedside, or at work in a little room near the head of her bed, never 
beyond call. His eldest daughter, a little girl of ten, but maturer 
than her years denoted, never lost the vivid recollection of her 
father's tender assiduity during those months. When the morning 
of September 6 dawned, it was evident that she had not many hours 
to live; and all the family gathered round her bed. Thirty years 
after, six of the female servants of the house enjoyed a kind of hon- 
orable distinction at Monticello, as " the servants who were in the 
room when Mrs. Jefferson died, " — such an impression did the scene 
leave upon the minds 'of the little secluded community. It was a 
tradition among the slaves, often related by these six eye-witnesses, 
that the dying lady gave her husband "many directions about many 
things that she wanted done ; " but that when she came to speak of 
the children, she could not command herself for some time. At last 
she said that she could not die content if she thought her children 
would ever have a step-mother; and her husband, holding her hand, 
solemnly promised that he would never marry again.* Towards 
noon, as she was about to breathe her last, his feelings became 

* Jefferson at Monticello, p. 106. 

265 



266 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

uncontrollable. He almost lost his senses. His sister, Mrs. Carr, 
led liim staggering from the room into his library, where he fainted, 
and remained so long insensible that the family began to fear that 
he, too, had passed away. They brought in a pallet, and lifted 
him upon it. lie revived only to a sense of immeasurable woe. 
Plis daughter Martha, who was to be the solace of all his future 
years, ventured into the room at night; and even then, such was 
the violence of his grief, that she was amazed and confounded. 
For three weeks he remained in that apartment, attended day and 
night by this littla child. He walked, as she related, almost inces- 
santly, all day and all night, only lying down now and then, when 
he was utterly exhausted, upon the pallet that had been hurriedly 
brought while he lay in his fainting fit. When at last he left the 
house, he would ride on horseback hours and hours, roaming about 
in the mountain roads, in the dense woods, along the paths least 
frequented, accompanied only by his daughter, — "a solitary wit- 
ness," she says, " to many a violent burst of grief, the remembrance 
of which has consecrated particular scenes beyond the power of time 
to obliterate." 

So passed some weeks. He fell into what he called " a stupor of 
mind," from which the daily round of domestic duties could not 
rouse him. Meanwhile the intelligence of his loss reached Congress, 
then in session at Philadelphia, waiting with extreme solicitude the 
issue of the negotiations for peace at Paris. Six months had already 
passed since the negotiations had been begun, during the last three 
of which Dr. Pranklin had been laid aside by an attack of his 
disease, leaving the chief burden to be borne by Mr. Jay alone. It 
now occurred to the Virginia members, that, as the causes of Mr. 
Jefferson's previous declining to cross the sea were removed, he 
might be willing to join the commission to treat for peace. He was 
at once elected a plenipotentiary by a unanimous vote, and, as 
Madison reports, "without a single adverse remark." The news of 
his election reached him November 25, 1782, eleven weeks after the 
deatli of his wife, when he had gone with his troop of children, — 
daughters, nephews, and nieces, nine in all, — to a secluded estate 
in Chesterfield County to have them inoculated. 

It was like a trumpet-call to a war-horse standing listless under a 
tree in the pasture, after a rest from the exhaustion and wounds of 
a campaign. He accepted instantly. He flew to his long-neglected 



DEATH OF MES. JEFEEESON. 267 

desk to write the necessary letters, and to bring up the arrears in 
his correspondence ; for the French minister had offered him a pas- 
sage in a man-of-war which was to sail from Baltimore in three 
weeks, and in that vessel his beloved Marquis de Chastelluxwas also 
to cross the ocean! Enchanting prospect! But*there is many a 
slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. When he reached the port, after 
many delays, it was only to discover that the enemy's fleet blocked 
the pathway to the sea; and before the admiral saw a chance to 
elude them came the ecstatic news that the preliminaries had been 
signed, and there was no need of his going. So he wrote to Mr. 
Jay to give up the lodgings in Paris which he had requested him 
to engage ; and in May, 1783, he was at home once mors. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

IN CONGRESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 

BiTT the spell was broken. He had shown himself willing to serve 
the public. Nest month the legislature elected him a member of 
Congress ; and in November, 1783, we find him at Annapolis ready 
to take his seat, after having left his eldest daughter at school in 
Philadelphia. 

In the universal languor which followed the mighty effort of 1781, 
it was hard to get twenty-five members together; but Jefferson 
found them brimful of the spirit of disputation ; for Arthur Lee was 
a member, the most disputatious man of whom history condescends 
to make mention. Caught in a shower in London, he sought the 
shelter of a shed, when a gentleman ventured the civil remark that 
it rained very hard. " It rains hard, sir," said Lee, " but I doubt 
whether you can say it rains very hard." One such person would 
suffice to set any twenty men by the ears. Days were wasted in 
the most trivial and needless debates, during Avhich the good-tem- 
pered Jefferson sat silent and tranquil. A member asked him one 
day, how he could listen to so much false reasoning, which a word 
would refute, and not utter\hat word. " To refute,*' said he, " is easj' ; 
to silence, impossible." He added, that, in measures brought forward 
by himself, he took, as was proper, the laboring oar; but, in general, 
he was willing to play the part of a listener, content to follow the 
example of Washington and Franklin, who were seldom on their 
feet more than ten minutes, and yet rarely spoke but to convince. 
Despite the copious flow of words, many memorable things were 
done by this Congress; and though Jefferson sat in it but five 
months, his name is imperish ably linked with some of its most inter- 
esting measures. It is evident that he often took "the laboring 
oar." Twice during the sickness of the president, he was elected 
268 



IN CONGRESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 269 

cliairman of the body ; and his name stands at the head of every 
committee of much importance. 

He it was, who, as chairman of the committee of arrangements, 
wrote the much-embracing address with which the President of Con- 
gress received General Washington's resignation of his commission. 
He assisted in arranging the details of that affecting and immortal 
scene. The spectacle presented in the chamber at Annapolis im- 
pressed mankind ; and the two addresses winged their way round the 
world, affording " a lesson useful to those who inflict and to those 
who feel oppression." As a member of this Congress, Thomas Jef- 
ferson, with four other signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
namely, Eoger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, Robert Morris, and William 
Eller}^, signed the treaty of peace which acknowledged the inde- 
pendence of the United States. 

A currency for the new nation, to take the place of the chaos of 
coins and values which had plagued the colonies from an early day, 
was among the subjects considered at this session. Jefferson, chair- 
man of the committee to which the matter was referred, assisted to 
give us the best currency ever contrived by man, — a currency so 
convenient, that, one after another, every nation on earth will adopt 
it. Two years before Gouverneur Morris, a clerk in the oflSce of his 
uncle, Robert Morris, had cODceived the most happy idea of applying 
the decimal system to the notation of money. But it always re- 
quires several men to complete one great thing. The details of the 
system devised by Gouverneur Morris were so cumbrous and awk- 
ward as almost to neutralize the simplicity of the leading idea. 
Jefferson rescued the fine original conception by proposing our pres- 
ent system of dollars and cents ; the dollar to be the unit and the 
largest silver coin. He recommended also a great gold coin of ten 
dollars value, a silver coin of the value of one-tenth of a dollar, and 
a copper coin of the value of one-hundredth of a dollar. He sug- 
gested three other coins for the convenience of making change, — a 
silver half-dollar, a silver double-tenth, and a copper twentieth. It 
remained only to invent easy names for these coins, which was done 
in due time. 

This perfect currency was not adopted without much labor and 
vigorous persistence on the part of Jefferson, both in and out of 
Congress. His views prevailed over those of Robert Morris, the first 
name in America at that time in matters of finance. 'Jefferson 



270 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

desired to apply the decimal system to all measures ; and this, doubt- 
less, will one day be done! " I use," he tells us, " when I travel, an 
odometer, which divides the miles into cents, and I find every one 
comprehends a distance readily when stated to him in miles and 
cents ; so he would in feet and cents, pounds and cents." 

Jefferson struck another blow at slavery this winter, which again 
his Southern colleagues warded off. The cession by Vii-ginia of her 
vast domain in the north-west, out of which several States have been 
formed, was accepted by this Congress ; and it was Mr. Jefferson 
who drew the plan for its temporary government. He inserted a 
clause abolishing slavery " after the year 1800 of the Christian era." 
In a Congress of twenty-three members, only seven voted no; but, as 
a measure could only be adopted by a majority of States, these suf- 
ficed to defeat it. Every member from a Northern State voted for it, 
and every Southern member except two against it. 

In this ordinance, Jefferson assigned names to various portions of 
the territory. If his names had held, we should to-day read upon 
the map of the United States, Sylvania, Michigania, Cherronesus, 
Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illiuoia, Saratoga, Polypotamia, Pelispia, 
instead of the present names of the States west and north-west of 
Virginia. We have improved upon his names. Ohio is better than 
Pelispia ; and the least agreeable of the present names is not so bad 
as Assenisipia. 

Absorbed as he was in these public duties, he could not forget the 
desolation of his home ; and he seems to have thought of returning 
to Mouticello with some degree of dread. But when the strongest 
tie is severed, others grow stronger. He had another dream of the 
future now, suggested by his young friend, James Monroe, talk- 
ing of buying a farm near Monticello with a view to settle there. 
His three most congenial and beloved friends at this time were 
James Madison, James Monroe, and William Short. We might 
almost style them his disciples ; for they had been educated under his 
influence or guidance, and were curiously in accord with him on 
questions moral and political. Why, he asked, could not they all 
live near one another in Albemarle, and pass their days in study 
and contemplation, a band of brothers and philosophers ? Madison, 
just disappointed in love, which kept him a bachelor for many a 
year, had gone home to his father's house in Orange, where he sought 
relief in the most intense and unremitting study. Who was better 



IN CONGRESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 271 

fitted to console him than Jeffereon, who had had a similar experi- 
ence in his tender youth ? Jefferson did his best, and begged him 
to ride over to Monticello as often as he chose, and regard the library- 
there as his own. And more, "Monroe is buying land almost 
adjoining me. Short will do the same. What would I not give if 
you could fall into the circle. With such a society, I could once 
more venture home, and lay myself up for the residue of life, quitting 
all its contentions, which daily grow more and more insupportable." 

There was a little farm two miles from Monticello, of a hundred 
and forty acres of good land, with a small, old, indifferent house 
upon it, that would just do, Jefferson thought, for a republican and 
a philosopher ; for it was just such an establishment as his beloved 
friend, Dabney Carr, had been so happy in. It could be bought for 
two hundred and fifty pounds. " Think of it," he urged. ■'' To ren- 
der it practicable only requires you to think so." !^Iadison, all un- 
suspicious of the different career in store for himself and his three 
friends, replied that he could neither accept nor renounce the capti- 
vating scheme. He could not then change his abode ; but, in a few 
years, he thought he might make one of the circle proposed. The 
large estates of his father required his attention and presence. Mon- 
roe alone settled in the neighborhood, though Madison lived all his 
life within a day's ride. 

With General Washington, too, we find Mr. Jefferson in close 
relations during the spring of 1784. They agreed in deploring the 
weakness, the utter insufficiency, of the central power, and in think- 
ing tliere must be something besides Congress, if only a committee 
of members to remain at the seat of government during the absence 
of the main body. The country was feeling its way to a constitu- 
tion. Independence had been won, but a nation had not yet been 
created. It was just after receiving General Washington's concur- 
rence, that Jefferson brought forward his proposition to divide the 
work of Congress into legislative and executive, and to intrust the 
executive functions to a permanent committee of one from each 
State. This was the first attempt towards a government ; and its 
failure, as Mr. Jefferson records, was speedy and complete. A com- 
mittee of thirteen was only a more disputatious and unmanageable 
Congress. The committee being appointed. Congress adjourned, 
leaving it the supreme power of the continent ; but they "quarrelled 
very soon," split into two parties, abandoned their post, and left the 



272 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

government without any visible head until the next meeting of 
Congress. Jefferson remarks that many attributed their disruption 
to the disputatious propensity of certain men ; but the wise, to the 
nature of man. The failure of the executive committee had its 
effect in preparing the wa}'' for the convention of 1787. 

On another point Jefferson and Washington were in full accord 
this winter. For more than ten years the general had been 
warmly interested in connecting the great system of western waters 
with the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Potomac River. Besides 
public reasons, General Washington had a private one for favoring 
this scheme. He owned a superb tract of land on the Ohio, which 
was dearer to his pride than important to his fortune ; for he had 
won it by his valor and conduct in the defence of his native land in 
the French War. If the Potomac were but rendered navigable back 
to the mountains, and then connected with the nearest branch of the 
Ohio by a canal, this fine western estate would be advantageously 
accessible. The general was deep in the scheme when he was 
elected to take command of the army in 1775, and resumed it as soon 
as he was released in 1783 ; and he now pursued it with the more 
zeal for a new reason. He had become acquainted during the war 
with the pushing energy of the people of New York. He had pro- 
phetic intimations of the Erie Canal. In March, 1784, when De 
Witt Clinton was a school-boy of fifteen. General Washington, the 
father of our internal-improvement system, wrote thus to Thomas 
Jefferson, " With you, I am satisfied that not a moment ought to 
be lost in recommencing this business, as I know the Yorkers will 
delay no time to remove every obstacle in the way of the other com- 
munication, so soon as the posts of Oswego and Niagara are surren- 
dered ; and I shall be mistaken if they do not build vessels for the 
navigation of the lakes, which will supersede the necessity of coast- 
ing." Any one familiar with the magnificent line of cities created 
by the Erie Canal, and with the harbors of Buffalo, Toledo, Oswego, 
and Chicago, finds it difficult to realize that this sentence was 
written less than ninety years ago. 

The general had acquired in some way a strong conviction of the 
resistless enterprise of the New Yorkers. He returns to the subject 
in a letter to Benjamin Harrison. "No person," he says, "that 
knows the temper, genius, and policy of those people as well as I 
do, can hurbor the smallest doubt of their connecting New York and 



IN CONGEESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 273 

the lakes by a canal. It is curious these same Kew Yorkers, 
in 1874, after having dug, enlarged, and superseded their own canal, 
should be carrying out Washington's idea in a way he never 
dreamed of, by completing the railroad from Richmond to the Ohio. 
Such is the "temper, genius, and policy of those people." 

A topic of the deepest interest at this time was the Societ}'' of the 
Cincinnati, the first annual meeting of which was to occur in May. 
Members of Congress, not of the order, viewed it with extreme dis- 
approval, and were resolved, as Jefferson reports, " to give silent 
preferences to those who were not of the fraternit}'," in the bestowal 
of office. It was not in human nature for such men as Henry, 
Madison, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, and John 
Page, to regard with favor an institution designed to perpetuate the 
distinctions of the war, even to remote generations; an institution 
that would give a valuable advantage to the posterity of a raw lieu- 
tenant of one campaign over the offspring of the most illustrious 
sages of the civil service. Besides, the events of the last eighteen 
years had implanted in the minds of reflecting Americans a dread 
and horror of the hereditary principle, to which the recent bloody 
disruption of the British Empire was due. General Washington, 
who was to preside at the coming assembly, was troubled and 
anxious at the growing opposition. He ashed Jefferson's opinion. 
Jefferson was utterly opposed to the order, and said so in a long and 
ingenious letter to the general ; and when Washington passed 
through Annapolis, a few weeks after, on his way to the meeting, he 
called on Jefferson to talk the matter over with him. 

They sat together alone at Jefferson's lodgings from eight o'clock 
in the evening until midnight. They agreed that the object of the 
officers in founding the society was to preserve the friendships of the 
war by renewing their intercourse once a year. Nothing more 
innocent than the motive. But they agreed, also, that there was 
great danger of the order degenerating into an hereditary aristoc- 
racy ; and, meanwhile, it was odious to the great body of civilians. 
In the course of the conversation Jefferson suggested, that, if the 
hereditary quality were suppressed, there would be no harm in the 
officers who had actually served coming together in a social way 
now and then. "No," said the general, "not a fibre of it ouglit to 
be left, to be an eyesore to the public, a ground of dissatisfaction, 
and a line of separation between thena and their country." 
18 



274 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

The general resiunGcl liis journe}*, fully resolved to use his influ- 
ence with the members of the order to induce them to disband. He 
tried his best. Most of the old officers came into liis views at length, 
and he thought he had secured a majority against going on ; but 
just then arrived from France Major I'lnfant, as Jefferson tells us, 
"with a bundle of eagles for which he liad been sent there, with 
letters from the French officers who had served in America praying 
for admission into the order, and a solemn act of their king permit- 
ting them to wear its ensign." All was changed in a moment. 
Such was the revulsion of feeling, that the general could only 
obtain the suppression of the hereditary principle; which, however, 
sufficed to render the order as unobjectionable as the societies of simi- 
lar nature which were formed after the late war. ) 

Jefferson had a new pleasure during this session, that of writing 
to his daughter Martha in Philadelphia. No one who has ever 
loved a child can read his letters to his children without emotion ; 
least of all, those written while the anguish of their irrej)arable loss 
was still recent. It is difficult to quote them, because' nearly every 
sentence is so lovelj'^ and wise, that we know not what to select. 
Imagine all that the tenderest and most thoughtful father could 
wish for the most engaging child. But the burden of his song was, 
that goodness is the greatest treasure of human beings. " If you 
love me," he says, " strive to be good under every situation, and to 
all livincf creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I 
have put in your power." A curious trait of. the times is this : " It\ 
produces great praise to a lady to spell well."/ Happy would it be for 
those benefactors of our race, the wise and faithful teachers of the 
young, if ever}'' parent would use such words as these in writing to 
his children at school : " Consider the good lady who has taken you 
under her roof, who has undertaken to see that you perform all your 
exercises, and to admonish you in all those wanderings from what is 
right, and what is clever, to which your inexperience would expose 
you; consider her, I say, aa your mother, as the only person to 
whom, since the loss with which Heaven has been pleased to afflict 
you, you can now look up ; and that her displeasure or disapproba- 
tion, on any occasion, would be an immense misfortune, which, 
should you be so unhappj^ as to incur by any unguarded act, think 
no concession too much to regain her good-will." 

The session drew to great length. When pressing domestic 



IN CONGEESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 275 

measures had been disposed of, Congress turned its attention to 
foreign aifairs ; and this led to an important change in the career 
of Jefferson. " I have been thrown back," he wrote to General 
Washington, April 16, 1784, " on a stage where I had never more 
thought to appear. It is but for a time, however, and as a daj^- 
laborer, free to withdraw, or be withdrawn, at will." Three weeks 
after these words were written. Congress found a piece of work for 
this day-laborer to do. 

It was the golden age of " protection." All interests were pro- 
tected then, except the interests of human nature ; and every right 
was enforced, except the rights of man. British commerce and 
manufactures, since Charles II., had been so rigorously protected, 
that, when a member of Parliament moved that Americans should 
be compelled to send their horses to England to be shod, there was 
room for doubt whether he was in jest or earnest. James Otis 
believed he spoke ironically ; only believed ! But there was no 
doubt of the seriousness of the parliamentary orator who avowed 
the opinion that " not a hobnail should be made in America ; " nor 
of the binding force of the law which made it penal for an Ameri- 
can to carry a fleece of wool across a creek in a canoe. John 
Adams, looking back in his old age upon the studies of his early 
professional life, declared, that, as a young lawyer, he never turned 
over the leaves of the British statutes regulating American trade 
" without pronouncing a hearty curse upon them." He felt them 
" as a humiliation, a degradation, a disgrace," to his country, and to 
himself as a native of it. 

One consequence of this fierce protection was, that America was 
not on trading terms with the nations of the earth ; and Congress 
felt that one of its most important duties, after securing indepen- 
dence, was to propose to each of them a treaty of commerce. With 
France, Holland, and Sweden, such treaties had already been nego- 
tiated ; but Congress desired commercial intercourse, " on the 
footing of the most favored nation," with Great Britain, Hamburg, 
Saxony, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, Austrja, Venice, - Rome, Naples, 
Tuscany, Sardinia, Genoa, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Algiers, Tripoli, 
Tunis, and Morocco. Congress wielded sovereign power ; a nation 
was coming into existence ; and the conclusion of treaties was at 
once a dignified way of asserting those not sufficiently obvious 
truths, and a convenient mode of getting them acknowledged by 



276 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

other nations. Congress, as Jefferson confesses, though it would 
not condescend to ask recognition from any of the powers, yet " we 
are not unwilling to furnish opportunities for receiving their friend- 
ly salutations and welcome." 

Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, who still represented Congress in 
Europe, were not supposed to be equal to so much hibor. May 7, 
1784, Congress agreed to add a third plenipotentiary to aid them in 
negotiating commercial treaties ; and their choice for this office fell 
upon Thomas Jefferson. The appointment was for two j^ears, at the 
reduced salary of nine thousand dolkirs a year. He accepted the 
post ; and, expecting to be absent only two j'ears, he determined to 
spare himself a laborious journey home, and the re-opening of a 
healing wound, by going direct from Annapolis northward "in quest 
of a passage." This he could do the easier, since, as he records, "I 
asked an advance of six months' salary, that I might be in cash to 
meet the first expenses ; which was ordered." I£is two younger 
children were in safe hands at home ; and his eldest daughter he 
w^ould take with him, and place at school in Paris. His nephews he 
left to the guardianship of James Madison, to whom, on the day 
after his election, he wrote in an affecting strain ; — 

" I have a tender legacy to leave you on my departure. I will 
not say it is the son of my sister, though her worth would justify it 
on that ground ; but it is the son of my friend, the dearest friend 
I knew, who, had fate reversed our lots, would have been a father to 
my children. He is a boy of fine dispositions, and of sound, mascu- 
line talents. I was his preceptor myself as long as I staid at 
home ; and, when I came away, I placed him with Mr. IVfaury. 
There is a younger one, just now in his Latin rudiments. If I did 
not fear to overcharge you, I would request you to recommend a 
school for him." 

Mr. Madison fulfilled this trust with affectionate care, and kept 
his friend informed of the progress of his nephews during his long 
absence. 



CHAPTER XXXIL 



ENVOY TO FRANCE. 



Mat 11, four days after his election, the plenipotentiary left 
Annapolis for Philadelphia, a four d:iys' journey then ; and, while his 
daughter was getting ready for her departure, he improved the oppor- 
tunity to collect precise and full information respecting the com- 
merce of the port ; for was he not going to Europe on commercial 
business? One of the toasts given in 1784, at the May-day festi- 
val of the St. Tammany Society of Philadelphia, which he probably 
read in the newspapers during his stay, gave him a hint of what 
was desired, " Free-trade in American Bottoms." Pleasing dream ! 
Many a year must yet j^ass before it comes true. It was a buoyant, 
I expectant time, when Mr. Jefferson made this sea-board journey. 
The refuse of the war was clearing away, and new projects were in 
the air. It was while Jefferson was in Philadelphia on this occasion, 
that some ingenious contriver managed to extract from the deep 
mud of the bottom of the Delaware those chevaux-de-frise which 
Dr. Eranklin had placed there nine years before to keep out the 
British fleet, to the sore obstruction of the navigation ever since. 
It was an " Herculean task," said the newspapers, requiring " vast 
apparatus;" but up came the biggest cheval of them all at the 
first yank of the mighty engine. 

But this was a small matter compared with the project for an 
" air-biijloon " of silk, sixty feet high, also announced while Jeffer- 
son was in Philadelphia, to be paid for by private subscriptions. 
Philadelphia, too, should behold the new wonder of the world, de- 
scribed at great length in a Paris volume lately received from Dr. 
Eranklin. Gentlemen were invited to send their money, and phi- 
losophers their advice, to the committee having the scheme in 
charge. The glowing prospectus issued by the committee may have 

27Y 



278 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

drawn a guinea and a smile from Jefferson. " Is it not probable," 
asked these sanguine gentlemen, " tliat those who sometimes travel 
through the parched and sandy deserts of Arabia, where there is 
danger of perishing for want of water, or of being buried under 
mountains of sand suddenly raised by whirling eddies of wind, as 
hath too often been the case, would prefer a vo^'age by means of an 
air-balloon to any other known method of conveyance ? In places 
where the plague may suddenly appear, it is capable, when im- 
proved, of rescuing those from danger who happen to be travelling 
through that region without any other means of making their escape. 
It may perform the same service to such as are suddenly surprised 
by unexpected sieges, and to whom no other means of safety may be 
left." " Quick advices may be given of intended invasions ; " and, 
in short, war rendered so little destructive, that no one will think it 
worth while to resort- to that " unchristian mode of arbitrating dis- 
putes." Then, " by means of these balloons, the utmost despatch 
may be given to express-boats," which they will both lift and draw. 
They were expected also to enable philosophers to push their dis- 
coveries into the upper regions of the air, to ascertain " the causes 
of hail and snow," and " make further improvements in thermome- 
ters, barometers, hygrometers, in astronomy and electricity." This 
programme of blessings did not tempt the guineas fast enough, 
until the committee added personal solicitation; and when, at last, 
the balloon ascended, they were obliged to charge two dollars for the 
best places in the ampliitheatre. 

It was a simple, credulous world, then, full of curiosity respecting 
the truths which science was beginning to disclose. Tliis balloon 
prospectus, with its betrayals of ignorance, credulity, and curiosity, 
was perfectly characteristic of the period. I am not sure that 
Franklin and Jefferson would have deemed it so venj absurd, though 
Franklin might have thought it improbable that a traveller caught 
by an unexpected siege would have a balloon in his trunk. Frank- 
lin had high hopes of the balloon. " Of what use is this discovery 
which makes so much noise ? " some one asked him, soon after the 
first ascension in Paris. " Of what use is a new-born child ? " was 
his reply. '^ ^ 

In quest of a passage to France, the plenipotentiary, his daughter, 
and William Short, whom he was so happy as to have for a secretary, 
left Philadelphia near the end of May, and went to New York. 



ENVOY TO FRANCE. 279 

The monthly Ha\Te packet, La Sj'^lphe, had been gone ten days. 
After a few days' stay in New York, where he continued his com- 
mercial studies, the party resumed their " quest," travelling eastward 
from port to port in the leisurely manner of the time. At New 
Haven, could he fail to pause a day or two to view a college so dis- 
tinguished as Yale, and converse with the president and professors, 
and promise to send them from Europe some account of the new dis- 
coveries and the new books ? The newspapers, silent as to his stay 
in Philadelphia and New York, chronicle the arrival of His Excellency 
at New Haven on the 7th of June, and his departure for Boston on 
the 9th. At Boston the travellers met another disappointment, 
peculiarly aggravating. A good ship was within thirty-six hours 
of sailing, in which Mrs. Adams was going to join her husband ; 
and she would have been as agreeable a companion to the father 
as a kind protector to the daughter. But, in those clays, passengers 
had to lay in stores of various kinds, and make extensive prepara- 
tions for a voyage, which could not be done in so short a time, even 
if the plenipotentiary had regarded his commercial information as 
complete. Mrs. Adams sailed without them ; but, while Jefferson 
was thinking of returning in all haste to New "iork to catch the 
next French packet, he heard of a Boston ship loading for London, 
that would, it was thought, put him ashore on the French coast. It 
proved to be the ship Ceres, belonging to Nathaniel Tracy, one of 
the great merchants of New England, who was going in her him- 
self, and would land the party at Portsmouth, after having passed 
the whole voj'^age in communicating commercial knowledge to Mr. 
Jefferson. Nothing could have been more fortunate. 

Boston gave the Virginian a courteous ajid warm reception on this 
occasion. A chair in the chamber of the Massachusetts House of 
Representatives was assigned to "His Excellency, Thomas Jefferson, 
late governor of Virginia, and now one of the commissioners_ for 
negotiating treaties ; " and " no small part of my time," as he wrote 
to Elbridge Gerry, " has been occupied by the hospitality and civilities 
of this place, which I have experienced m the highest degree." ]\Ir. 
Gerry not reaching home in time to see him off, Jefferson left for 
him a present, not common then, which he was rather fond of giv- 
ing, a portable writing-desk. To add to his knowledge of business, 
he made an excursion along the coast to Salem, Newburyport, Ports- 
mouth, towns beginning already to feel the impulse towards the 



280 LIFE OP TH05IAS JEFFERSON. 

remoter commerce which was to enrich them. -Harvard, noted from 
of ohl for a certain proclivity towards science, had at this time, in Dr. 
Willard, a president who was particularly interested in scientific 
discovery. Jefferson made his acquaintance now, became his corre- 
spondent, and thus kept the college informed of the progress of 
knowledge. 

The Fourth of July was Sunday this year. There was the usual cele- 
bration on Monday ; but it was on that day the Ceres sailed, bear- 
ing away the author of the Declaration of Independence. So far as 
we know, Jefferson was not yet known to the public as the writer of 
that document. About the time in the morning of July 5 when 
the Declaration was read in Faneuil Hall, the Ceres spread her 
sails, and glided out into the ocean between the emerald isles that 
form Boston Harbor. They had a splendid passage, — nineteen days 
from shore to shore, three days dead calm and codfishing on the 
Banks, only six passengers, and every thing delightful. Thirty- 
two days after leaving Boston, the plenipotentiary was at a hotel in 
Paris, while a house was making ready for him. He was at once a 
familiar member of the easy, happy circle of able men and amiable 
women who assembled at Dr. Franklin's pleasant abode in the subur- 
ban village of Passy. 

The aged philosopher could not but smile at the mountain of new 
duties which Congress had imposed upon him, instead of the permis- 
sion to return home for which he had applied. It so chanced that 
he was writing to Mr. Adams upon the subject on the very day of 
Jefferson's arrival in Paris ; and he discussed it with that sly humor 
with which he knew how to parry and return every disagreeable 
stroke : " You will see that a good deal of business is cut out for us, 
— treaties to be made with, I think, twenty powers, in two years, — 
so that we are not likely to eat the bread of idleness ; and, that we 
may not eat too much, our masters have diminished our allowance " 
(from $11,000 to $9,000 per annum). ''I commend their econ- 
omy, and shall imitate it by diminishing my expense.) Our too 
liberal entertainment of our countrymen here has been reported at 
home by our guests, to our disadvantage, and has given offence. 
They must be contented for the future, as I am, with plain beef and 
pudding. The readers of Connecticut newspapers ought not to be 
troubled with any more accounts of our extravagance. For my own 
part, if I could sit down to dinner on a piece of their excellent salt 



ENVOY TO FRANCE. 281 

pork and pumpkin, I would not give a fartliing for all the luxuries 
of Paris." 

In three weeks Mr. Adams arrived ; and the three plenipotentiaries 
held their first meeting at Dr. Franklin's house, agreeing to meet 
there every day until the business was concluded. Besides announ- 
cing their mission to various ambassadors, thej^ did nothing during 
the first month except prepare the draught of a treaty such as they 
would be willing to sign. What an amiable, harmless, useless docu- 
ment it seems ! But it was the first serious attempt ever made to 
conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles ; and it 
was made by three men to whom Arrogance has sometimes denied 
the name of Christians ! Many of its twenty-seven articles were 
nothing but the formal concession of the natural right of a man to 
go, come, stay, buy, and sell, according to his own interest and pleas- 
ure, subject only to the laws of the country in which he may be. 
One article provided that shipwrecked mariners should not be plun- 
dered ; and another, that "when the subjects or citizens of the one 
party shall die within the jurisdiction of the other, their bodies shall 
be buried in the usual burying-grounds, or other decent and suitable 
places, and shall be protected from violence and disturbance." What 
a tale of savage intolerance is told by the mere proposal of such an 
article ! 

It was into the latter half of the treaty that the three representa- 
tives of» the United States put most of their hearts. Their great 
object was to confine the evils of war, as much as possible, to belli- 
gerents. They desired to have war conducted in the manner of a 
play-ground fight, where a ring is formed, and no one is hit but the 
combatants, and they are prevented from striking a foul blow. Xo 
j)rivateering. No confiscation of neutral property. No molestation 
of fishermen, farmers, or other noncombatants. ITo ravaging an 
enemy's coasts. No seizure of vessels or other property for the pur- 
poses of war. No crowding of prisoners of war into unwholesome 
j)laces. Article XVII. was wonderful for its advanced magnanim- 
\ty : "If the citizens or subjects of either party, in danger from 
tempests, pirates, or other accidents, shall take refuge with their 
vessels or eftects within the harbors or jurisdiction of the other, they 
shall be received, protected, and treated with humanity and kind- 
ness, and shall be permitted to furnish tliemselves, at reasonable 
prices, with all refreshments, provisions, and other things necessary 



282 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

for their subsistence, liealtli, and accommodation, and for the repair of 
their vessels." Such was the treaty drawn by throe early Christians 
in Dr. Franklin's house at Passy in 1784. It marks "a new era 
in negotiation," wrote General Washington when he read it; and 
he regarded it always as the most original and liberal treaty ever 
negotiated. 

When tliey had finished their draught, and when, as I suppose, the 
doctor had caused a few copies to be struck off on the little printing- 
press wliich he kept in his house for such odd jobs, they sought a 
conference with that worthy, but extremely unsentimental minister 
for foreign affairs, the Count de Vergennes, and asked him how they 
had better proceed in order to coiciliate the twenty powers (includ- 
ing Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli), and dispose them to con- 
clude such a treaty with the Honorable Congress. I wish we had 
some account of thQ interview. We only know, from- Jefferson's too 
brief report, that the astute old diplomatist did not attach much im- 
portance to the labors of the commissioners. He evidently thought 
that Congress, in sending Jefferson to Europe on this errand, had 
performed a superfluous work, and that the proposal of such a treaty 
to the Dey of Algiers, or to the personage styled in the instructions 
of the commissioners " the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble 
Prince, King, and Emperor of the Kingdom of Fez, Morocco, Taffi- 
lete, Sus, and the whole Algasbe, and the territories thereof," would 
be a diplomatic absurdity. He thought it better, and the 'commis- 
sioners came into the same opinion, " to leave to legislative regula- 
tion, on both sides, such modifications of our commercial intercourse 
as would voluntarily flow from amicable dispositions." 

The commissioners did, nevertheless, fulfil their instructions by 
"sounding " the several ambassadors resident at Paris, most of whom 
forwarded copies of the draught to their courts. At that moment there 
was in Europe but one intelligent man upon a throne, — '' old Fred- 
erick of Prussia," as Jefierson styles him, who "met us cordially 
and without hesitation ; " and with him the treaty, with unimpor- 
tant changes, was concluded. Denmark and Tuscany also entered 
into negotiations. The other powers appeared soinditFerent, that the 
commissioners could not, consistently with self-respect, press the 
matter. " They seemed, in fact," says Jefferson, " to know little 
about us, except as rebels who had been successful in throwing off 
the yoke of the mother country. They were ignorant of our com- 



ENVOY TO FEANCE. 283 

merce, wliicli had always been monopolized by England, and of the 
exchange of articles it might offer advantageously to both parties." 
In short, the commission to negotiate commercial tx'eaties had but one 
important result, namely, the composition of the draught of the treaty, 
and its preservation in the Diplomatic Correspondence of the United 
States, against the time when the nations shall want it. It seems a 
mockery of noble endeavor that such a draught should have been 
placed on record on the eve of wars which desolated Europe for 
twenty years, during which every principle of humanity and right 
was ruthlessly trampled under foot. Napoleon Bonaparte was a 
youth of sixteen when the commissioners completed it. The treaty 
to this day remains only an'admonition and a prophecy. 

Nine months passed. On the 2d of May, 1785, the youngest of 
the commissioners received from Mr. Jay, secretary for the foreign 
affairs of Congress, a document of much interest, to him, signed by 
the President of Congress, Richard Henry Lee : — 

" The United States of America in Congress assembled, to our trusty 
and loell-beloved Thomas Jefferson, Esq., send greeting : — 

" We, reposing special trust and confidence in your integrity, pru- 
dence, and ability, have nominated, constituted, and appointed, and 
by these presents do nominate, constitute, and appoint you, the said 
Thomas Jefferson, our Minister Plenipotentiary to reside at the court 
of his most Christian Majesty; and do give you full power and 
authority there to represent and do and perform all such matters 
and things as to the said place or office doth appertain, or as may by 
our instructions be given unto you in charge. This commission to 
continue in force for the space of three years from this day (March 
10, 1785), unless sooner revoked." 

This honorable charge Jefferson gratefully and gladly accepted. 
"You replace Dr. Franklin," said the Count de Vergennes to him, 
when he went to announce his appointment. " I succeed ; no one 
can replace him," was Jefferson's reply. He witnessed the memo- 
rable scene of Dr. Franklin's departure from Passy, on the 12th of 
July. All the neighborhood, and a great number of friends from 
Paris, gathered to bid the noble old man farewell. The king could 
not have been treated with an homage more profound or more sincere. 
Indeed, it was often remarked at the time, that only the young king 



284 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

was ever greeted by the people of Paris so warmly as Franklin. 
The queen, mindful of his age and infirmities, had sent her own 
travelling-litter, a kind of Sedan chair carried between two mules, 
to convey him to Havre. At four o'clock on that summer afternoon, 
he was assisted into this strange vehicle, and began his long, slow 
journey, followed by the heartfelt benedictions of friends and neigh- 
bors. " It seemed," wrote Jefferson, " as if the village had lost its 
patriarch." 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

FIRST IMPRESSIOXS OF EUROPE. 

The United States has contributed to tlie diplomatic circles of 
the Old World some incongruous members, heroes of the caucus and 
the stump, not versed in the lore of courts, and unskilled in draw- 
ing-room arts. So, at least, we are occasionally told by persons who 
think it a prettier thing to bow to a lady than to an audience, and 
nobler to chat agreeably at dinner than to discourse acceptably to a 
multitude. Perhaps we shall do better in the diplomatic way by and 
by. Hitherto our diplomatists have won their signal successes sim- 
ply by being good citizens. We have never had a Talleyrand, nor 
one of the Talleyrand kind (though we came near it when Aaron 
Burr was pressed for a foreign appointment), and no American has 
ever been sent to lie abroad for his country's good. We have had, 
however, besides a large number of respectable ministers in the ordi- 
nary way, three whose opportunitj'^ was, at once, immense and unique, 
— Prauklin, Jefferson, and Washburne ; and each of these proved 
equal to his opportunity. 

It is not as a record of diplomatic service that Jefferson's five 
years' residence in France is specially important to us. France and 
America were like lovers then, and it is not difficult to negotiate 
between lovers. His master in the diplomatic art was the greatest 
master of it that ever lived, — Benjamin Franklin's excellence 
being, that he conducted the intercourse of nations on the princi- 
ples which control men of honor and good feeling in their private 
business,' who neither take, nor wish, nor will have, an unjust 
advantage, and look at a point in dispute with their antagonist's 
eyes as well as their own, never insensible to his difficulties and his 
scruples. It is what France did to Jefferson that makes his long 
residence there historically important ; because the mind he carried 

285 



286 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

home entered at once into the forming character of a young nation, 
and became a part of it forever. All these millions of people, whom 
we call fellow-citizens, are perhaps more or less ditferent in their 
character and feelings from what they would have been, if, in the 
distribution of diplomatic offices in 1785, Congress had sent Jeffer- 
son to London instead of Paris, and appointed John Adams to Paris 
instead of London. 

At first he had the usual embarrassments of American ministers: 
he could read, but not speak, the French language, and he was 
sorely puzzled how to arrange his style of living so as not to go 
beyond his nine thousand dollars a year. The language was a diffi- 
culty which diminished every hour, though he never trusted him- 
self to write French on any matter of consequence ; but the art of 
living in the style of a plenipotentiary, upon the allowance fixed by 
Congress, remained difficult to the end. Nor could he, during the 
first years, draw much revenue from Virginia. He left behind him 
there so long a "list of debts" (the result of the losses and desola- 
tions of the war), that the proceeds of two crops, and the arrears of 
his salary as governor, voted by the legislature, only sufficed to 
satisfy the most urgent of them. 

A Virginia estate was a poor thing indeed in the absence of the 
master; and unhappily, the founders of the government of the 
United States, in arranging salaries, made no allowance for the 
American fact, that the mere absence of a man from home usually 
lessens his income and increases his expenditure. Even Franklin 
took it for granted that we should always have among us men of 
leisure, most of whom would be delighted to serve the public for 
nothing. Who, indeed, could have foreseen a state of things, such 
as we see around us now, when the richer a man is the harder he 
works, and when, in a flourishing city of a hundred thousand 
inhabitants, not one man of leisure can be found, nor one man of 
ability who can "afford " to go to the legislature? Jefferson, Adams, 
and perliaps I may say most of the public men of the country, have 
suffered agonies of embarrassment from the failure of the first Con- 
gresses to adopt the true republican principle of jjaying for all 
service done the public at the rate which the requisite quality of 
service commands in the market. The only great error, perhaps, 
of Washington's career was his aristocratic disdain of taking fair 
wages for his work, — an error which most of his successors and 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE. 287 

many of their most-valued ministers have rued in silent bitterness, 
Nay, he rued it himself. What anxious hours Washington himself 
passed from the fact that there were so few competent statesmen in 
the country who chanced to be rich enough to live in Philadelphia 
on the salary of a secretary of state ! 

Jefferson was somewhat longer than usual in getting used to 
what he called "the gloomy and damp climate" of Paris, — such a 
contrast to the warmth, purity, and splendor of the climate of his 
mountain home. We find him, too, still mourning his lost wife, and 
writing to his old friend Page, that his "princijjal happiness was 
now in th^ retrospect of life." Moreover, the condition of human 
nature in Europe astonished and shocked him beyond measure. He 
was not prepared for it ; he could not get hardened to it. While 
experiencing all those art raptures which we should presume be 
would, — keenly enjoying the music of Paris above all, and the 
architecture only less, falling in love with a statue here and an 
edifice there, — still, he could not become reconciled to the hideous 
terms on which most of the people of France held their lives. At 
his own pleasant and not inelegant abode, gathered most that was 
brilliant, amiable, or illustrious in Paris. Who so popular as the 
minister of our dear allies across the sea, the successor of Franklin, 
the friend of Lafayette, the man of science, the man of feeling, the 
scholar and musical amateur reared in the wilderness ? He liked 
the French, too, exceedingly. He liked their manners, their habits, 
their tastes, and even their food. He was glad to live in a com- 
munitj'-, where, as he said, " a man might pass a life without 
encountering a single rudeness," and where people enjoyed social 
pleasures without eating like pigs and drinking like Indians. But 
none of these things could ever deaden his heart to the needless 
misery of man in France. Read his own words : — 

First to his young friend and pupil, James Monroe, in June, 
1785, when he had been ten months in Paris: "The pleasure of the 
trip [to Europe] will be less than j^ou expect, but the utility greater. 
It will make you adore your own country, — its soil, its climate, its 
equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little 
do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in pos- 
session of, and which no other people on earth enjoy ! I confess I 
had no idea of it myself." 

To Mrs. Trist, in August, 1785: "It is difficult to conceive how 



288 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

so good a people, with so good a king, so well-disposed rulers in 
general, so genial a climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so 
ineffectual for producing human happiness by one single curse, — 
that of a bad form of government. But it is a fact, in spite of the 
mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by the 
vices of the form of government. Of twenty millions of people sup- 
posed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen millions 
more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human exist- 
ence, than the most conspicuously- wretched individual of the whole 
United States." 

To an Italian friend in Virginia, September, 1785: ''Behold me, 
at length, on the vaunted scene of Europe ! You are, perhaps, curi- 
ous to know how it has struck a savage of the mountains of 
America. Not advantageously, I assure you. I find the general 
fate of mankind here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's 
observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be 
either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true picture of that country 
to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see 
God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled 
under their feet. 

To George Wythe of Virginia, in August, 1786 : " If anybody 
thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the 
public happiness, send him here. It is the best school in the iiniverse 
to cure him of that folly. He will see here, with his own eyes, that 
these descriptions of men are an abandoned conspiracy against the 
happiness of the people. Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against 
ignorance ; establish and improve the law for educating the common 
people. Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can pro- 
tect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for 
this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be 
paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we 
leave the people in ignorance." 

To General Washington, in November, 1786 : " To know the mass. 
of evil which flows from this fatal source [an hereditary aristocracy], 
a person miist be in France ; he must see the finest soil, the finest 
climate, and the most compact State, the most benevolent character 
of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insaflScient to pre- 
vent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four 
out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country." 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE. 289 

To James Madison, in January, 1787 : " To have an idea of the 
curse of existence under a government of force, it must be seen. It 
is a government of wolves over sheep." 

To another American friend, in August, 1787 : "If all the evils 
which can arise among us from the republican form of government, 
from this day to the day of judgment, could be put into scale against 
what this country suffers from its monarchical form in a week, or 
England in a month, the latter would preponderate. No race of 
kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty 
generations. The best they can do is to leave things to their minis- 
ters ; and what are their ministers but a committee badly chosen?" 

To Governor Kutledge of South Carolina, August, 1787 : " The 
European are governments of kites over pigeons." 

To another American friend, in February, 1788: "The long- 
expected edict at length appears. It is an acknowledgment (hitherto 
withheld by the laws), that Protestants can beget children, and that 
they can die, and be offensive unless buried. It does not give them 
permission to think, to speak, or to worship. It enumerates the 
humiliations to which they shall remain subject, and the burthens to 
which they shall continue to be unjustly exposed. What are we to 
think of the condition of the human mind in a country where such 
a wretched thing as this has thrown the State into convulsions, and 
how must we bless our own situation in a country the most illiterate 
peasant of which is a Solon compared with the authors of this law. 
Our countrymen do not know their own superiority." 

Such were the feelings with which he contemplated the condition 
of the French people. But he was in a situation to know, also, how 
far "the great" in France were really benefited by the degradation 
of their fellow-citizens. Their situation was dazzling; but there 
was, he thought, no class in America who were not happier than 
they. Intrigues of love absorbed the younger, intrigues of ambition 
the elder. Conjugal fidelity being regarded as something provincial 
and ridiculous, there was no such thing known among them as that 
"tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America 
blesses most of its inhabitants, leaving them free to follow steadily 
those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly 
delicious the intervals of those pursuits." 

Such sentiments as these were in vogue at the time, even among 
19 



290 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the ruling class. Beaumarcliais' Marriage of Figaro was in its first 
run when Jefferson reached Paris. Doubtless he listened to the bar- 
ber's soliloquy in the fifth act (a stump-speech d la mode de Paris), 
the longest soliloquy in a modern Comedy, in which Beaumarchais, 
as we should say, " arraigns the administration." " I was thought 
of for a government appointment," says poor Eigaro, " but, unfortu- 
nately, I was not fit for it . An arithmetician was wanted, — a dancer 
got it." Jefferson rarely mentions the theatre in his French letters ; 
but the theatre in Paris is like dinner, too familiar a matter to get 
upon paper. Beaumarchais himself he knew but too well ; for the 
brilliant dramatist was a claimant of sundry millions from the Hon- 
orable Congress for stores furnished during the war, which puzzled 
and perplexed every minister of the United States from Franklin 
to Rives. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 

Our plenipotentiary was one of the most laborious of men during 
his residence in Europe. He had need of all his singular talent for 
industry. The whole of a long morning he usually spent in his 
office hard at work ; and sometimes, as his daughter reports, when 
he was particularly pressed, he would take his papers, and retire 
to a monastery near Paris, in which he hired an apartment, and 
remain there for a week or two, all the world shut out, till his task 
was done. In the afternoon he walked seven miles into the countrj'-, 
and back again ; and, in the evening, music, art, science, and society 
claimed him by turns. I must endeavor, in a few words, to indicate 
the nature and objects of such incessant toil. 

And, first, as to his public and official duties. The two continents 
were then as far apart as America is now from Australia. It took 
Jefferson from fourteen to twenty weeks to get an answer from home ; 
and, if his letters missed the montlily packet, there was usually no 
other opportunity till the next. It was part of his duty as minister 
to send to Mr. Jay, secretary for the foreign affairs of Congress, not 
only a regular letter of public news, but files of the best newspapers. 
He did, in fact, the duty of own correspondent, as well as that of 
plenipotentiary, with much that is now done by consuls and com- 
mercial agents. As it was then a part of the system of governments 
in Europe to open letters intrusted to the mail, important letters 
had to be written in cipher; which was a serious addition to the 
labor of all official persons. An incident of Mr. Jefferson's second 
year serves to show at once the remoteness of America from Europe, 
the difficulty of getting information from one continent to another, 
and the variety of emploj'ments which then fell to the lot of the 
American minister. He received a letter making inquiry concerning 

5 291 



292 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

a young man named Abraham Albert Alpbonso Gallatin, -who had 
emigrated from Switzerland to America six years before, and of 
whose massacre and scalping by the Indians a report had lately 
reached his friends in Geneva. It was to the American minister that 
the distressed family (one of the most respectable in Switzerland), 
applied for information concerning the truth of the report. In case 
this young man had fallen a victim to the savages, Mr. Jefferson 
was requested to procure a certificate of his death, and a copy of 
his will. It was in this strange way that Thomas Jefferson first 
obtained knowledge of the Albert Gallatin whom he was destined to 
appoint secretarj'- of the treasury. 

France and America, I say, were like lovers then. And yet, in 
one respect, the new minister found Frenchmen disappointed with 
the results of the alliance between the two countries. The moment 
the war closed, commerce had resumed its old channel; so that the 
new flag of stars and stripes, a familiar object on the Thames, was 
rarely seen in a port of France. Why is this ? Mr. Jefferson was 
frequently asked. Does friendship count for nothing in trade ? Is 
this the return France had a right to expect from America ? Do 
Americans prefer their enemies to their friends ? The American 
minister made it his particular business, first, to explain the true 
reason of this state of things, and then to apply the only remedy. 
In other words, he made himself, both in society and in the audi- 
ence-room of the Count de Vergennes, an apostle of free-trade. 

The spell of the protective system, in 1785, had been broken in 
England, but not in France. Jefferson showed the Count de Ver- 
gennes that it was the measure of freedom of trade which British 
merchants enjoyed that gave them the cream of the world's com- 
merce. He told the count (an excellent man of business and an 
honorable gentleman, but as ignorant as a king of political economy), 
that if national preferences could weigh with merchants, the whole 
commerce of America would forsake England and come to France. 
But, said he, in substance, our merchants cannot buy in France, be- 
cause you will not let them sell in France. One day he went over 
the whole list of American products, and explained the particular 
restriction, or system of restrictions, which rendered it impossible 
for American merchants to sell it in France at a profit. Indigo, -^ 
France had troj)ical islands, the planters of which she must " pro- 
tect." TobaccO; — Oh, heavens ! in what a coil and tangle of protec- 



THE WOEK OF HIS MISSION. 293 

tion was that fragrant weed ! First, tlie king liad the absolute 
monopoly of the sale of it. Secondly, the king had " farmed " the 
sale to some great noblemen, who, in turn, had sub-let the right to 
men of business. These gentlemen had concluded a contract with 
Robert Morris of Philadelphia, giving him a complete monopoly of 
the importation for three years. Morris was to send to France 
tweniy thousand hogsheads a year at a fixed price ; and no other 
creature on earth could lawfully send a pound of tobacco to France. 

The learned reader perceives that there was a tobacco King in 
1785, which included king, noblemen, French merchants, and Mr. 
Jefferson's friend, Robert Morris. When, in the course of this 
enumeration, he came to the article of tobacco, and explained the 
mode in which it was "protected," the count remarked that the king 
received so large a revenue from tobacco, that it could not be 
renounced. " I told him," as Mr. Jefferson relates, " that we did not 
wish it to be renounced, or even lessened, but only that the monopoly 
should be put down ; that this might, be effected in the simplest 
manner by obliging the importer to pay, on entrance, a duty equal 
to what the king now received, or to deposit his tobacco in the king's- 
warehouses till it was paid, and then permitting a free sale of it. 
^Mafoi!' said the count, 'that is a good idea: we must think of 
it.' " 

They did think of it. Mr. Jefferson kept them thinking during 
the whole of his residence in Paris. In man}'' letters and in conver- 
sation, vivid with his own clear conviction, and warm with his ear- 
nest purpose to serve both countries, and man through them, he 
expounded the principles of free-trade. " Each of our nations," he 
said, " has exactly to spare the articles which the other wants. We 
have a surplus of rice, tobacco, furs, peltry, potash, lamp-oils, timber, 
which France wants ; she has a surplus of wines, brandies, esculent 
oils, fruits, manufactures of all kinds, which we want. The govern- 
ments have nothing to do but not to Ititider their merchants from 
making the exchange" 

To the theory of free-trade every thinking man, of course, assented. 
But when it came to practice, he generally found (as free-traders 
now do) that private interest was too powerful for him. It was in 
France very much as it was in Portugal. After negotiating for 
years witii the Portuguese minister for the free admission of Amer- 
ican products, Jefferson succeeded in getting his treaty signed, and 



294 ' LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

sent to Lisbon for ratification. The astute old Portuguese ambassa- 
dor predicted its rejection. " Some great lords of the court," said 
he to Mr. Jefferson, " derive an important part of their revenue from 
their interest in the flour-mills near the capital, which the admission 
of American flour will shut up. Thei/ will prevail upon the king to. 
reject it." And so it proved. Jefferson, however, was not a man 
to prefer no bread to half a loaf. He did really succeed in France, 
after twelve months' hard work and vigilant attention, aided at 
every turn by the Mai-quis de Lafayette, whose zeal to serve his 
other country across the ocean knew no diminution while he lived, 
in obtaining some few crusts of free-trade for the merchants of 
America ; which had an important effect in nourishing the infant 
commerce between the two countries. Nor did he rest content with 
them. He could not break the Morris contract, nor even wish it 
broken ; but, aided by Lafayette's potent influence, he obtained from 
the ministry' an engagement that no contract of the same nature 
should ever again be permitted. To the last month of his stay in 
Europe, we find, in his voluminous correspondence, that he still 
strove to loosen what he was accustomed to call '' the shackles upon 
trade." 

His efforts in behalf of free-trade in tobacco exposed him to the 
enmity of Robert Morris and his kindred, one of the most powerful 
circles in the United States, including Gouverneur Morris, as able 
and honorable an aristocrat as ever stood by his order, — a man of 
Bismarckian acuteness, candor, integrity, and humor. In writing 
of this matter, in confidence, to James Monroe, Jefferson held this 
language : " I have done what was right ; and I will not so far wound 
my privilege of doing that without regard to any man's interest, as 
to enter into any explanations of this paragraph with Robert Morris. 
Yet I esteem him highly, and suppose that hitherto he had esteemed 
me." The paragraph to which he alludes was one in a letter of the 
French minister of finance, in which there was an expression 
implying that Mr. Jefferson had recommended the annulling of the 
Morris contract. This he had not done. On the contrary, he had 
maintained that to annul it would be unjust. But he deemed it 
unbecoming in him as a public man to so much as correct this 
misapprehension. 

The reader, perhaps, has supposed that the evils resulting from 
tariflf-tinkering are peculiar to the United States. Mr. Jefferson 



THE TVORK OF HIS MISSION. 295 

knew better. As often as he succeeded in getting a restriction upon 
trade loosened a little, an injured interest cried out, and did not 
always cry in vain. In 1788 he obtained a revisal of the tariff in 
favor of American products, which admitted American whale-oil 
(before prohibited) at a duty of ten dollars a tun. This was a vast 
boon to Yankee whalers. But an existing treaty between France 
and England obliged France to admit English oil on the terms of 
"the most-favored nation." At once the English oils "flowed in," 
over-stocked the market, and lowered the price to such a point, that 
the French fishermen and sealmen could not live. An outcry arose, 
which the French Ministry could not disregard. Then it was pro- 
posed to exclude all " Europe'an oils, which would not infringe the 
British treaty ; " and this idea Jefferson, free-trader as he was, 
encouraged with patriotic inconsistency, because, as he says, it would 
give to the French and American fisheries a monopoly of the French 
market." The arret was drawn up ; ministers were assembled ; and 
in a moment more it would have been passed, to the enriching of 
Nantucket and the great advantage of all the New-England coast. 
Just then a minister proposed to strike out the word European, 
which would make the measure still more satisfactory to French oil- 
men. The amendment was agreed to ; the arret was signed ; and, 
behold, Nantucket excluded ! 

As soon as Jefferson heard of this disaster, he put forth all his 
energies in getting the arret amended. Not content with verbal and 
written remonstrance, he took a leaf from Dr. Franklin's book, and 
caused a small treatise upon the subject to be printed, " to entice 
them to read it," particularly the new minister, M. Necker, who, 
minister as he was, had "some principles of economy, and will enter 
into calculations." He succeeded in his object, and soon had the 
pleasure of sending to Nantucket, through Mr. Adams, a notification 
that the whalemen might put to sea in full confidence of being 
allowed to sell their oil in French ports on profitable terms. He 
testified to the generous aid he had had in this business from Lafa- 
yette : " He has paid the closest attention to it, and combated for 
us with the zeal of a native." 

Other curious incidents of his five-years' war against the protec- 
tive system press for mention ; but, really, one suffices as well as 
a thousand. It is alwa^'^s the same story : the interests of men 
against the rights of man, — temporary and local advantage oppose^ 



296 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

to the permanent interest of the human race, — a sliriuking from a 
fair, open contest, and compelling your adversary to go into the ring 
with one hand tied behind him. Nevertheless, such is the nature of 
man, that the progress from restriction to freedom, whether in poli- 
tics, religion, or trade, mn«»j be slow in order to be sure. It is human 
to cry, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians," when you live bj^ mak- 
ing images of the chaste goddess. Even Jefferson, a free-trader by 
the constitution of his mind, was not so very ill-content with a 
"monopoly" which shut English whalemen out of the ports of France, 
and let his own countrymen in. The principle was wrong, but he 
could bear it in this instance. It required many years of pig-headed 
outrage to kill his proud and yearning love for the land of his ances- 
tors ; but the thing was done at last, with a completeness that left 
nothing to be desired. 

Among the powers with which the commissioners of the United 
States endeavored to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce on 
sublime Christian principles, were Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli, and ^' the 
high, glorious^ mighty, and most noble King, Prince, and Emperor" 
of Morocco. Before Mr. Jefferson had held the post of plenipoten- 
tiary many weeks, he was reminded most painfully, that those 
powers were not yet, perhaps, quite prepared to conduct tlieir for- 
eign affairs in the lofty style proposed. A rumor ran over Europe, 
that Dr. Franklin, on his voyage to America, had been captured by 
the Algerines, and carried to Algiers ; where, being held for ransom, 
he bore his captivitj'^ with the cheerfulness and dignity that might 
have been expected of him. Nor was such an event impossible, nor 
even improbable. The packets plying between Havre and New 
York were not considered safe from the Algerine corsairs in 1785. 
Nothing afloat was safe from them, unless defended by superior guns, 
or protected by an annual subsidy. Among the curious bits of 
information which Jefferson contrived to send to Mr. Jay, was a list 
of the presents made by tlie Dutch, in 1784, to the aforesaid King, 
Prince, and Emperor of Morocco. The Dutch, we should infer from 
this catalogue, supplied the emperor with the means of preying upon 
the commerce of the world ; for it consists of items like these : 69 
masts, 30 cables, 267 pieces of cordage, 70 cannon, 21 anchors, 285 
pieces of sail-cloth, 1,450 pulleys, 51 chests of tools,"12 quadrants, 12 
compasses, 26 hour-glasses, 27 sea-charts, 50 dozen sail-needles, 24 
tons of pitch ; besides such " extraordinary presents " as 2 pieces of 



THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 297 

scarlet cloth, 2 of green clotli, 280 loaves of sugar, one chest of tea, 
24 china punch-bowls, 50 pieces of muslin, 3 clocks, and one " very 
large watch." He learned, too, that Spain had recently stooped to 
buy a peace from one of these piratical po^yers at a cost of six hun- 
dred thousand dollars. 

It was in the destiny of Mr. Jefferson, at a later time, to extort a 
peace from these pirates in another way, and, in fact, to originate the 
system that rid the seas of them forever. But at present the coun- 
try which he represented was not strong enough to depart from the 
established system of purchase. The United Stated was a gainer 
even by the treaty for which Spain had paid so high a- price ; for 
Spain was then in close alliance with the republic which had humbled 
the great enemy of the House of Bourbon. In the spring of 1785 
came news that the American brig Betsy had been captured and 
taken to Morocco, where the crew were held for ransom. It was the 
good offices of Spain that induced the King, Prince, and Emperor of 
Morocco to make a present to the American minister at Cadiz of 
the liberty of the Betsy's crew. But when Mr. Carmichael waited 
on the Spanish ambassador to thank him, " in the best Spanish he 
could muster," for the friendly act of the king, he was given to 
understand, that, unless the United States sent an envoy to j\Iorocco 
with presents for the emperor, no more crews would be released 
except on the usual terms. Mr. Carmichael notified Mr. Jefferson of 
these events, and added that he feared further depredations from the 
Algerines. Thirteen prizes had recently been brought in by them, 
chiefly Portuguese, he thought. " The Americans, I hope, are too 
much frightened already," said he, " to venture any vessels this way, 
especially during the summer.'" And they ran some risk even in , 
the more northern latitudes. 

A month later Mr. Jefferson received a doleful letter from three 
American captains in Algiers, which brought the subject home to 
him most forcibly : " We, the subjects of the United States of 
America, having the misfortune of being captured off the coast of 
Portugal, the 24th and 30th of July, by the Algerines, and brought 
into this port, where we are become slaves, and sent to the work- 
houses, our sufferings are beyond our expressing or your concep- 
tion, .... being stripped of all our clothes, and nothing to exist on 
but two small calves of bread per day, without any other necessa- 
ries of life." But the captains had found a friend : " Charles Logie, 



298 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Esq., British consul, seeing our distressed situation, has taken us 
three masters of vessels out of the workhouse, and has given security 
for us to the Dey of Algiers, Klnrj of CrueltiesP The sailors, how- 
ever, remained in the workhouses, where they would certainl}^ starve, 
the captains thought, if Mr. Jefferson could not at once prevail upon 
Congress to grant them relief. 

In writing this letter, the three captains provided Mr. Jefferson 
with seven years' trouble. During all the remainder of his resi- 
dence at Paris, and years after his return home, one of his chief 
employments was to procure the deliverance of those unfortunate 
prisoners from captivity. After making some provision for their 
maintenance, he explained to Congress the necessity of treating with 
the pirates as the Spaniards had done, money in hand. He was 
authorized to give twenty thousand dollars to the High and Mighty 
Prince and Emperor of Morocco, and the same sum to the King of 
Cruelties, for a treaty of peace. Inadequate as these sums were, 
they seemed stupendous to a Congress distressed with the debt of 
the Revolution, fearing to learn by every arrival that their credit 
was gone in Europe, through the failure of their agents to effect a 
new loan. Jefferson and Adams took the liberty of doubling the 
price for a treaty with Algiers; offering forty thousand dollars for a 
treaty and the twenty prisoners. They felt that this was assuming 
a responsibility which nothing could justify but the emergency of 
the case. " The motives which led to it," wrote Jefferson to Mr. 
Jay, "must be found in the feelings of the human heart, in a par- 
tiality for those sufferers who are of our own country, and in the 
obligations of every government to yield protection to their citizens 
as the consideration for their obedience." He assured the secretary'', 
"that it would be a comfort to know that Congress did not disap- 
prove this step." He received that comfort in due time; but the 
forty thousand dollars did not get the treaty, nor bring home the 
captives. The agents whom he despatched returned with the report 
that upon such terms no business could be done. 

And so the affair drew on. In the spring of 1786 Mr. Jefferson, 
upon an intimation received from Mr. Adams, hurried over to Lon- 
don to confer with the ambassador of Tripoli upon the matter; sup- 
posing that whatever bargain they might make with Tripoli would 
be a guide in their negotiations with Algiers and Morocco. The 
two Americans met the ambassador, and had a conversation with 



THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 299 

him whicli one would think more suitable to A. D. 1100 tnan 1786, 
The first question discussed between them was, whether it vyere bet- 
ter for the United States to buy a temporary peace by annual pay- 
ments, or a permanent peace by what our English friends elegantly 
style "a lump sum." The ambassador was much in favor of a per- 
manent peace. Any stipulated annual sum, he said, might cease to 
content his country ; and an increased demand might bring on a war, 
which would interrupt the payments, and give new cause of differ- 
ence. It would be much cheaper in the long run, he assured thein, for 
the United States to come down handsomely at once, and make an 
end of the business. 

That question having been duly considered, the Americans were 
ready to listen to the terms ; which were these : for a treaty of peace 
with Tripoli, to last one year, with privilege of renewal, twelve thou- 
sand five hundred guineas to the government, and one thousand two 
hundred and fifty guineas to the ambassador; for a permament 
peace, thirty thousand guineas to the government, and three thou- 
sand guineas to the ambassador; cash down on receipt of signed 
treaty. N.B. — Merchandise not taken. On the same terms, the 
ambassador assured them, a peace could be had with Tunis ; but, 
with regard to Algiers and Morocco, he could not undertake to prom- 
ise any thing. Peace with the four piratical powers, then, would 
cost Congress at least six hundred and sixty thousand dollars. If 
the affair had not involved the life and liberty of countrymen, the 
American commissioners might have laughed at the disproportion 
between the sums they were empowered to offer and those demanded. 

Disguising their feelings as best they could, they "took the lib- 
erty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of the preten- 
sions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury." 
The ambassador replied : It was written in their Koran, that all na- 
tions which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom 
it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; 
and that every Mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure 
to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to 
board a vessel had one slave over and above his share; and that 
when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held 
a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth, which usually 
struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at 
OBce. It was the opinion of this enlightened public functionary 



300 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFPEESON. 

that the Devil aided his countrymen in these expeditions j for they 
were almost always successful. 

It is diiScalt for us to realize, only eighty-six years after this con- 
versation, that it could ever have been held ; still less that the Ameri- 
can commissioners should have seriously reported it to Mr. Jay, with 
an offer of their best services in trying to borrow the mone^y in Hol- 
land or elsewhere, and in concluding the several bargains for peace 
with the four powers ; least of all, that Mr. Jay should have sub- 
mitted the offers of the ambassador to Congress. Congress, in their 
turn, referred the matter back to Mr. Jay for his opinion, which he 
gave with elaboration and exactness. The substance of his report 
was this : We cannot raise the money; and it would be an injury to 
our credit to attempt to do so, and not succeed. 

Mr. Jefferson was obliged, therefore, to confine his efforts to the 
mere deliverance of the captives by ransom. This, too, was a mat- 
ter demanding the most delicate and cautious handling; for the 
price of a captive was regulated like j)rofessional fees, according to 
the wealth of the parties interested. Let those professional pirates 
but suppose a government concerned in a slave's ransom, and the 
price ran up the scale to a height most alarming. Jefferson was 
obliged to conceal from every one, and especially from the prisoners, 
that he had any authority to treat for their release, — a course that 
brought upon him a kind of censure hard to bear indeed. While 
he was exerting every faculty in behalf of the captives, he would 
receive from them " cruel letters," as he termed them, accusing him, 
not merely of neglecting their interests, but of disobeying the posi- 
tive orders of Congress to negotiate their ransom. 

He availed himself at length of the services of an order of monks 
called the Mathurins, instituted for the purpose of begging alms for 
the ransom of Christian captives held to servitude among the Infi- 
dels. Agents of theirs constantly lived in the Barbary States, 
searching out captives, and driving hard bargains in their purchase. 
As it was known that the Mathurins could ransom cheaper than atoy 
other agency, they were frequently employed by governments and 
by families in procuring the delivea:ance of captives. The chief of 
the order received Mr. Jefferson with the utmost benignity, and won 
his favorable regard by making no allusion to the religious heresy of 
the American captives. He offered to undertake the purchase, pro- 
vided the most profound secrecy were observed ; and he thought the 



THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 301 

twenty captives would cost Congress ten thousand dollars. Congress 
authorized the expenditure. But that was the time when it over- 
taxed the credit of the United States, even to subsist their half a 
dozen representatives in Europe. '* The moment I have the money," 
Mr. Jefferson was obliged to write, " the business shall be set in 
motion." But the money was long in coming. A new government 
was forming at Philadelphia. All was embarrassment in the 
finances, and confusion in the minds, of the transitory administration. 
The poor captives lingered in slavery year after year, dependent for 
daily sustenance, for months at a time, on advances made by the 
Spanish ambassador. As late as 1793 we still find Mr. Jefferson 
busied about the same prisoners in Algiers. 

While doing what he could for the relief and protection of his 
own countrymen, he set on foot a nobler scheme for delivering the 
vessels of all the maritime nations from the risk of capture by these 
pirates. He drew up a plan, which he submitted to the diplomatic 
corps at Versailles, for keeping a joint fleet of six frigates and six 
smaller vessels in commission, one-half of which should be always 
cruising against the corsairs, waging active war, until the four Bar- 
bary States were willing to conclude treaties of peace without sub- 
sidy or price. Portugal, Naples, the two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, 
Denmark, and Sweden, all avowed a willingness to share in the 
enterprise, provided France offered no opposition. Having satisfied 
the ambassadors on this point, he felt sure of success if Congress 
would authorize him to make the proposition as from them, and to 
support it by undertaking to contribute and maintain one of the 
frigates. But the power of the Congress of the old confederacy, 
never sufficient, was now waning fast. What could it ever do but 
recommend the States to pay their share of public expenses ? And 
the recommendations of this nature, as Jefferson remarked, were 
now so openly neglected by the States, that Congress "declined an 
engagement which they were conscious they could not fulfil with 
punctuality." It was an excellent scheme. Jefferson had drawn it 
up in great detail, and with so much forethought and good sense, 
tliat it looks on paper as though it might have answered the pur- 
pose. 

It fell to the lot of Jefferson to negotiate and sign a convention 
between France and the United States which regulated the consular 
services of both nations. Does the reader happen to know what 



302 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

despotic powers a consul exercised formerly? He was a terrible being. 
He was invested with much of the sacredness and more than the 
authority of an ambassador. The laws of the country in which he 
lived could not touch him, — could neither confine his person, nor 
seize his goods, nor search his house. Over such of his countrymen 
as fell into his power he exercised autocratic sway. If he suspected 
a passenger of being a deserter or a criminal, he could send him 
home ; if he caught a ship in a contraband act, he could order it 
back to its port. When Dr. Franklin came to arrange the consular 
service of the two countries, the Count de Vergennes simply 
handed him a copy of the consular convention established between 
Prance and the continental powers ; and this the doctor accepted, 
signed, and sent home for ratification, supposing it to be the correct 
and only thing admissible. " Congress received it," as Jefterson 
reports, " with the deepest concern. They honored Dr. Franklin, 
they were attached to the French nation, but they could not relin- 
quish fundamental principles." The convention was returned to 
Jefferson, with new instructions and powers ; and he succeeded, after 
a long and difficult negotiation, in inducing the French government 
to limit those excessive consular powers. The government, he 
explains, anticipated a very extensive emigration from France to the 
United States, which, under the old consular sj^stem, they could 
have controlled ; and hence they yielded it " with the utmost reluc- 
tance, and inch by inch." But thej^ yielded it at last with frank- 
ness and good-humor, and the consular system was arranged as we 
find it now. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

UNOmCIAIi LABORS. 

When we turn from the plenipotentiary's public duties to his 
semi-official and voluntary labors, it is impossible not to be stirred 
to admiration and gratitude. I do not know what public man has 
ever been more solicitous to use the opportunities which his office 
conferred of rendering solid service to his country, to institutions, 
to corporations, to individuals. He kept four colleges — Harvard, 
Yale, William and Mary, and the College of Philadelphia — advised 
of the new inventions, discoveries, conjectures, books, that seemed 
important. And what news he had to send sometimes ! It was he 
who sent to America the most important piece of mechanical intelli- 
gence that pen ever recorded, — the success of the Watt steam- 
engine, by means of which " a peck and a half of coal performs as 
much work as a horse in a day." He conversed at Paris with 
Boulton, who was Watt's partner in the manufacture of the engines, 
and learned from his lips this astounding fact. But it did not 
astound him in the least. He mentions it quietly in the postscript 
of a long letter; for no man yet foresaw the revolution in all human 
affairs which that invention was to effect. He went to see an engine 
at work in London afterwards ; but he was only allowed to view the 
outward parts of the machinery, and he could not tell whether the 
mill "wfis turned by the steam immediately," or by a stream of 
water which the steam pumped up. 

We are all familiar with the system of manufacturing watches, 
clocks, arm!?, and other objects, in parts so exactly alike that they 
can be used without altering or fitting. It was Jefferson who sent 
to Congress an account of this admirable idea, which he derived 
from its ingenious inventor, a French mechanic. He also forwarded 
specimens of the part of a musket-lock, by way of illustration. 

303 



304 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEHSON. 

Tlie system, wliicli was at first employed ojily in the manufacture 
of arms, seems now about to be applied to all manufactures. He 
sent to Virginia particular accounts of the construction of canals 
and locks, and of the devices employed in Europe for improving 
and extending the navigation of rivers ; information peculiarly 
welcome to General Washington and the companies formed under 
his auspices to extend the navigation of the James and the Potomac 
back to the mountains. 

Virginian as he was, he had a Yankee's love for an improved 
implement or utensil ; and he was alwaj's sending something ingeni- 
ous in that way to a friend. He scoured Paris to find one of the 
" new lamps " for Richard Henry Lee, failed to get a good one, 
tried again in London, and succeeded. Madison was indebted to 
him for getting made the most perfect watch the arts could then 
produce, — price six hundred francs, ; — and a portable copying- 
press of his own contriving, besides a great number of books for his 
library. A stroll among the book-stalls was one of his favorite 
afternoon recreations during the whole of his residence in Paris, so 
one of his daughters records ; and he picked up many hundreds of 
prizes in the way of rare and curious books, for Madison, Wythe, 
Monroe, and himself. 

Europe is still the chief source of our intellectual nourishment ; 
but, when Jefferson was minister in Paris, it was the only source. 
America had contributed nothing to the intellectual resources of 
man, except Pranklin ; and the best of Franklin was not yet acces- 
sible. We had no art, little science, no literature ; not a poem, not 
a book, not a picture, not a statue, not an edifice. Jefferson evident- 
ly recognized it as a very important part of his duty to be a channel 
of communication bj'' which the redundant intellectual wealth of one 
continent should go to lessen the poverty of the other. He had in 
his note-book a considerable list of Americans, such as Dr. Frank- 
lin, James Madison, George Wythe, Edmund Randolph, Dr. Stiles, 
of whom he was the literary agent in Europe, for whom he received 
the volumes of the Encyclopaedia as they appeared, and subscribed 
for copies of any work of value which was announced for publica- 
tion. In advance of international copyright, and, indeed, before 
Noah Webster had procured a home copj'^right for his spelling-book 
from a few of the State legislatures (the beginning of our copyright 
system), Jefferson aided two American authors to gain something 



UNOFFICIAL LABORS. 305 

from the European sale of their writings. He got forty guineas for 
an early copy of Ramsay's History of the Revolutionary War for 
translation into French ; and when he found that the London book- 
sellers did not dare sell the book, he sent for a hundred copies, and 
caused it to be advertised in the London papers, that persons in 
England wishing the work could have it from Paris, per diligence. 
Similar service he rendered Dx'. Gordon, author of the history of the 
war to which he had himself contributed. 

Some opportunities which occurred to him of aiding the growth 
of a better taste in America for architecture, he eagerly seized. 
Virginia was about to disfigure Richmond with public buildings ; 
and the commissioners wrote to him for plans, particularly a plan 
for a Capitol. What commission 'could have been more welcome ? 
From his youth up, before he had ever seen an edifice that was not 
repulsive, he was an enthusiast in architecture; and now, in Paris, 
it was a daily rapture to pass one of his favorite buildings. He 
would linger near it, he tells one of his friends, for a long time; 
would often go out of his way to catch a view of it ; loved to study 
it in new lights and unusual conditions of the atmosphere, and 
never grew weary of admiring it. 

As soon, therefore, as he received the letter from Richmond, he 
engaged the best architect of the day, and entered upon the joyous 
work. They took for their model the liaison Qiiarree of Kismes, 
which, he thought, was "one of the most beautiful, if not the most 
beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity ; 
. . , very simple, but noble beyond expression." All the time he 
could spare from pressing public duties he spent in adajiting the 
ancient model to modern utilities. But, with all his zeal, the plan 
consumed time ; and he was aghast one day, to receive news from 
home that the commissioners were beginning to build without it. 
He wrote to jVIadison, begging him to use all his influence for delay. 
" How is a taste," he asked, " for this beautiful art to be formed in 
our countrymen unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when 
public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for 
their study and imitation ? " The loss of a few bricks, he thought, 
was not to be weighed against "the comfort of laying out the pub- 
lic money for something honorable, the satisfaction of seeing an 
object and proof of national good taste, and the regret and mortifi- 
cation of erecting a monument of our barbarism, which will be 
20 



306 LEFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

loaded with execrations as long as it shall endure." He seems to 
have smiled at his own vehemence. " You see," he concluded, " I 
am an enthusiast on the subject of arts ; but it is an enthusiasm 
of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of 
my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the 
respect of the world, and j^rocure them its praise." 

Madison exerted himself; the work was stopped; the plan was 
accepted. But the home architect, as Professor Tucker tells us, 
mingled an idea or two of his own with those of the ancient master, 
and considerations of economy were allowed to modify parts of the 
design. The result many readers have seen iia that ill-starred, for- 
lorn-looking edifice, the Capitol of Virginia at Richmond. Kear it, 
on the Capitol grounds, is the best thing America has yet paid for 
in the way of a monument to the memory of deserving men, — the 
monument to Washington and other Virginians most distinguished 
in the Revolutionary struggle. Jefferson was much occupied with 
details of this fine work during his residence in Paris. Por. Virginia, 
also, he bought some thousands of stands of arms and other warlike 
material ; for who had yet so much as thought that Virginia was 
not a sovereign State ? 

There was no end of his services to the infant unskilled agricul- 
ture of his country. In Charleston and Philadelphia there was 
already something in the way of an agricultural society, to which 
he sent information, seeds, roots, nuts, and plants ; thus continuing 
the work begun in his father's youth by John Bartram of Philadel- 
phia, to whom be honor and gratitude forever ! To the Charleston 
society, Jefferson's benefactions were most numerous and imjiortant. 
Upon receiving the intelligence that he had been elected a member 
of the society, he sent them, with his letter of acknowledgment, 
"some seeds of a grass that had been found very useful in the 
southern parts of Europe," and was almost the only grass cultivated 
in Malta. It is to be feared the seed was not duly cared for by the 
society; for the ISTorthern eye looks in vain, in the Carolina?, for a 
vivid lawn or a fine field of grass. Afterwards he procured for them 
a quantity of the acorns of the cork-oak. Where are the cork-oaks 
that should have sprung from them ? He burned with desire to 
introduce the olive culture into the Southern States ; and he returns 
again and again to the subject in his letters. He saw what a great 
good the olive-tree was to Europe, from its hardiness, its fruitfulness, 



insrOFFICIAL LABOES. SOT 

tbe low quality of the soil in whicli it flourishes, aucl the agreeable 
flavor it imparts to many viands otherwise tasteless or disagreeable. 
He urged the Charleston society to make it a chief object to intro- 
duce the olive, and offered to send them bountiful supplies of plants 
of every valuable variety, and to be one of five persons to contribute 
ten guineas a year to their experimental culture in South Carolina. 

"ly'' he wrote to President Drayton, "the memory of those per- 
sons is held in great respect in South Carolina who introduced there 
the culture of rice, a plant which sows life and death with almost 
equal hand, what obligations would be due to him who should 
introduce the olive-tree, and set the example of its culture ! Were 
the owners of slaves to view it only as the means of bettering their 
condition, how much would he better that by planting one of those 
trees for every slave he possessed ! Having been mj'self an eye- 
witness to the blessings which this tree sheds on the poor, I never 
had my wishes so kindled for the introduction of any article of new 
culture into our own country." 

Olive-oil, however, despite his generous efforts, is not yet an 
American product. The societj' accepted his oifers. He sent them 
a whole ''cargo of plants." The culture was begun with enthusi- 
asm. But whether from want of skill, or want of perseverance, or 
the unsuitableness of the climate, or the excessive richness of. the 
soil, the trees did not flourish. The caper, too, of which he sent 
seeds and amplest information, we still import in long, thin bottles, 
from Europe; Cotton he dismisses with curious brevity, consider- 
ing the importance it has since attained. In writing of East India 
products to the Charleston society, he says, "Cotton is a precious 
resource, and which cannot fail with you." y' 

Eice was the great theme "of his agricultural letters. He was 
surprised, upon settling for the first time in a Catholic community, 
at the vast quantities of rice consumed ; for it was the great resource 
of all classes during Lent. Eish was then a costly article, so far 
from the sea. Voltaire laughs at the Paris dandies of his day, who 
alleviated the rigors of Lent by breakfasting with their mistresses 
on a fresh fish brought, post, from St. Malo, that cost five hundred 
francs, — a delicate mark of attention, he observes, to a pretty pen- 
itent. Kice, however, was the standing dish in France during the 
fasting-season, and the merchants timed their importations accord- 
ingly. Jefferson was struck with the small quantity of American 



308 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

rice brouglit to French ports and the low price it brought. Upon 
inquiry, he was told that the American rice (which reached France 
by way of England) was inferior in quality to that of Piedmont, and 
not so well cleaned. He sent to Charleston specimens of the kinds 
of rice sold in Paris, explained the inconveniences of a circuitous 
commerce, urged the Carolinians to send cargoes direct to Havre, 
and told them to be sure to get the bulk of the supply in port a 
month before Lent. As to the imperfect cleaning, he resolved to 
investigate that point to the uttermost. Being at Marseilles in 
1787, he inquired on every hand concerning the machine employed 
in Italy to hull and clean the rice. No one could tell him. The 
vast national importance of the matter, together with the warm 
responses which he had received from Charleston to his letters upon 
rice, induced him to cross the Alps, and traverse the rice-country on 
purpose to examine the hulling-mill employed there, to- the use of 
whicli he supposed the higher j)rice of the Italian rice was due. "I 
found their machine," he wrote to Edward Rutledge of South Caro- 
lina, "exactly such a one as you had described to me in Congress in 
the year 1783 ! " 

But he did not cross the Alps in vain. Seeing that the Italians 
cleaned their rice by the very mill used in South Carolina, he con- 
cluded that the Italian rice was of a better kind, and resolved to 
send some of the seed to Charleston. It was, however, part of the 
barbaric protective system to prevent the exportation of whatever 
could most signally bless other nations ; and no one was allowed to 
send seed-rice out of the country. Jefferson, falling back on the 
higher law, " took measures with a muleteer to run a couple of sacks 
across the Apennines to Genoa;" but, having small faith in the 
muleteer's success, he filled the pockets of his coat and overcoat with 
the best rice of the best rice-producing district in Italy, and sent it, 
in two parcels by different ships, to Charleston. The muleteer 
failed to run his sacks ; but this small store reached the Charleston 
society, who distributed it among the rice-planters, a dozen or two 
of grains to each. These were carefully sown and watched, usually 
under the master's eye. The species succeeded well in the rice 
country, and enabled the South-Carolina planters to produce the 
best rice in the world. If the reader has had to-day a pudding of 
superior rice, its grains were, in all probability, descended lineally 
from those which Jefferson carried off in his pockets in 1787. 



UNOFFICIAL LABOES. 809 

He afterwards sent the society rough seed-rice from the Levant, 
from Egypt, from Cochin-Cliina, from the East Indies ; besides an 
" improved tooth " of a rice-miU. He also perfected with the French 
government and with French merchants the best arrangements then 
possible for the direct importation of rice from South Carolina and 
Georgia. No man was ever more vigilant than he in detecting 
opportunities to benefit his country. How did he get unhulled rice 
from Cochin-China? "The young prince of that country, lately 
gone from hence, having undertaken that it shall come to me." 

Nor did he confine his services to his own country; for, as he said 
more than once, he regarded the ofSce which he filled as interna- 
tional, and he wished to be the medium of good to both countries. 
Among other American productions, he sent for two or three hundred 
pecan-nuts from the Far West, for planting in France. To Dr. 
Stiles he wrote, " Mrs. Adams gives me an account of a flower 
found in Connecticut, which vegetates when suspended in the air. 
She brought one to Europe. What can be this flower ? It would 
be a curious present to this continent." Such hints were seldom 
dropped in vain. Some of his correspondents took extraordinary 
pains to gratify liis desires of this nature. The venerable BufFon, 
getting past eighty then, and verging to the close of his illustrious 
career, was indebted to Jefferson for torrents of information concern- 
ing nature in America, as well as for many valuable specimens. He 
gave the great naturalist the skin of a pantlier, which the old man 
had never seen, and had not mentioned in his work ; also the horns 
and skins of American deer, the feet and combs of American birds, 
and many other similar objects. 

He did not, it seems, always agree with Buflfon. The old man 
held chemistry in contempt, — mere cooker}', he called it, — and 
held that a chemist was no better than a cook. " I think it," said 
Jeiferson, "on the contrary, the most useful of sciences, and big 
with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race." 
He combated, also, the Count de Buffbn's theory of the degeneracy 
of animals in America. After much discussion, he tried an argu- 
ment similar to that which Dr. Franklin had used, when, in reply 
to. a remark of the same nature, he requested all the Americans 
seated on one side of- the table to stand, and then all the Frenchmen, 
who happened to sit in a row on the otlier side. The Americans 
towered gigantic above the little Gauls, and the doctor came off 



810 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

triumphant. jTeiferson, on his part, wrote to General Sullivan of 
New Hampshire to send him the hones and skin of a moose, 
mightiest of the deer kind; Sullivan exaggerating the importance 
of the ohject, on fire to do honor to his country and ohlige its 
representative, formed a hunting party, plunged into the measureless 
snows of the New-Hampshire liills, found a herd, killed one, cut a 
road twenty miles to get it home, got the flesh from the hones, 
packed skeleton and skin in a great hox, with horns of five other 
varieties of American deer, and sent it on its way to the ocean. In 
the course of time Mr. Jefiierson received a hill of thirty-six guineas 
for the carriage of the box, and a glowing account from General 
Sullivan of his exertions in procuring its gontents. He paid the 
bill with a wry face, but the moose did not arrive. Six months 
after the grand hunt, he wrote thus : " That the tragedy might not 
want a proper catastrophe, the box, bones and all, are lost; so that 
this chapter of natural history will still remain a blank. But I 
have written to him 7iot to send me another. I will leave it for my 
successor to fill up, whenever I shall make my bow here." A. week 
later, however, he had the pleasure of sending the box to the Count 
de Bufifon, promising much larger horns another season. The 
naturalist gracefully acknowledged the gift, and owned that the 
moose was indeed an animal of respectable magnitude. " I should 
have consulted you, sir," said he, "before publishing vaj natural 
history, and then I should have been sure of my facts." He died 
next year, too soon to enjoy the enormous pair of buck's horns 
coming to Jefferson from his native mountains, to maintain in 
Europe the credit of his native continent. 

The publication of Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," in English and 
in French, was an interesting event of his residence in Europe. 
Saturated as the book was with the republican sentiment of which 
he was the completest living exponent, it was eagerly sought after 
in Paris, and had its effect upon the time. He appears to have 
taken a modest view of the merits of the work. " I have some- 
times thought," he wrote to his friend Hopkinson of Philadelphia, 
"of sending my 'Notes' to the Philosophical Society as a tribute 
due to them ; but this would seem as if I considered them as worth 
something, which I am conscious they are not. I will not ask for 
your advice on this occasion, because it is one of those on which 
no man is authorized to ask a sincere opinion." 



TTNOFFICIAL LABOES. 311 

A work mucli more important, upon wliicli he valued himself 
more than upon any thing he ever wrote in hife life, except the 
Declaration of Independence, and far more meritorious than that, 
was published in Paris in 1786. I mean his Act for Freedom of 
Eeligion, passed in that year by the Virginia legislature. He had 
copies of it printed, according to his custom. It was received and 
circulated with an ominous enthusiasm. I say ominous ; for the 
first effect of ideas so much in advance of the state of things could 
not be but destructive and disastrous. The whole diplomatic 
corps complimented the author by asking for a copy to transmit, to 
their several courts ; and he had it inserted in the Encydopedie, to 
which he had contributed articles, and material for articles, on 
subjects relating to the United States. " I think," he wrote to his 
old friend and mentor, George Wythe, that " our Act for Freedom 
of Religion will produce considerable good even in these countries, 
where ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and 
mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, 
that their redemption from them can never be hoped." Never is a long 
time. He told George Wythe, that if every monarch in Europe 
were to try as hard to emancipate the minds of his subjects from 
ignorance and prejudice, as he was then trying to keep them 
benighted, a thousand years would not raise them to the American 
level. He attributed the superiority of Americans, in freedom and 
dignity of mind, to their severance from the parent stock, and their 
separation from it by a wide ocean ; which had placed all things 
"under the control of the common sense of the ^eople.^ 



CHAPTER XXXVI. 



HIS TRAVELS IN EUROPE. 



A SUMMONS from Mr. Adams, Lis colleague in tlie commission for 
negotiating commercial treaties, called him to London in March, 
1786. He spent two months in England. The visit was an utter 
and a woful failure. What evils might have been averted — the 
war of 1812, for one item — if that unhappy dotard of a king had 
had the least glimmer of sense, or the smallest touch of nobleness! 
He received these two gentlemen, representatives of an infant nation 
oflfering amity and reciprocal good, in a manner so churlish as left 
them no hope of being so much as decently listened to. And they 
were not decently listened to. Ministers were cold, vague, evasive. 
Merchants said to them, in substance, America must send us her 
produce, 'must buy our wares : we are masters of the situation. 
Why should we treat ? What do we want more ? Society, too, 
gave them the cold shoulder. These two men, the most important 
personages upon the island, if England could but have known it, 
were held of less account than a couple of attaches of the Austrian 
legation. It required " courage," as Mr. Adams intimates, for a 
nobleman to converse with them at an assembly. " That nation," 
wrote Mr. Jefferson, "hate us; their ministers hate us ; and their 
king more than all other men." Strange infatuation! Fatal 
blindness ! 

Of course, being human, Mr. Jefferson did not relish England. 
He found the people heavy with beef and beer, of a growling tem- 
per, and excessively prona to worship power, rank, and wealth. 
" They are by no means the free-minded people we suppose them in 
Ainerica. Their learned men, too, are few in number, and are less 
learned, and infinitely less emancipated from jDrejudice, than those 
of France." In the mechanic arts, he admitted, they surpassed all 
312 



HIS TRAVELS IN EUEOPB. 313 

the world ; and he enjoyed most keenlj'- the English gardens and 
parks. London he thouglit a handsomer city than Paris, but not 
as handsome as Philadelphia ; and the architecture generally, in 
England, the " most wretched" he ever saw, not excepting America, 
nor even Virginia, " where it is worse than in any other part of 
America I have seen." 

He set the Londoners riglit on one point. The noted invention 
of the moment was a carriage-wheel, the circumference of which 
was made of a single piece of wood. As these wheels were patented 
and made in London, the invention was claimed as English, He 
told his friends, and caused the fact to be published, that the farmers 
in New Jersey were the first, since Homer's day, who were known 
to have formed wheels in that manner. Dr. Eranklin, some years 
before, had clianced to mention it to the person who then held the 
patent. The idea struck him ; and the doctor went to his shop, and 
assisted him in making a wheel of one piece. The Jerseymen did 
it by merely bending a green sapling, and leaving it bent till it was 
se't^ but as in London there were no saplings, the philosopher was 
kept experimenting for several weeks. He triumphed at length, 
and made a free gift of the process to the carriage-maker, who made 
a fortune by it. Jefferson visited the shop in which Dr. Eranklin 
had worked out the idea, where he received the story from the owner, 
who gave the whole credit to Franklin, and " spoke of him with love 
and gratitude." He also found, in the Iliad, the passage which proves 
that the Greeks and the Jersey farmers employed the same process :' 
" He fell on the ground like a poplar which has grown smooth in 
the western part of a great meadow, with its branches shooting from 
its summit. But the chariot-maker with the sharp axe has felled it, 
that he may bend a wheel for a beautiful chariot. It lies drying on 
the banks of a river." 

In company with Mr. Adams, he made the usual tour of England, 
visiting the famous parks, towns, battle-fields, edifices. So far as 
his letters show, nothing kindled him in England but the gardens, 
"the article in which England excels all the earth;" and he made 
the most minute inquiries as to the cost of maintaining those exqui- 
site places, in order to ascertain whether it were possible for him to 
have a really fine garden at Monticello. It is to be presumed he 
applauded Mr. Adams's harangue to the rustics on the battle-field of 
Worcester, — Cromwell's " crowning mercy." The impetuous Adams, 



314 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

exalted by the recollections called up by the scene, was offended at 
the stolid indifference of the people who lived near by. "Do Eng- 
lishmen," he exclaimed, "so soon forget the ground where liberty 
was fought for ? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is 
holy ground, much holier than that on which your churches stand! 
All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year ! " 
The by-standers, as Mr. Adams reports, were animated and pleased 
by this compliment to their-native field. The two Americans visited 
Stratford-upon-Avon ; but Mr. Jefferson only records that he paid 
a shilling for seeing Shakspeare's house, another for seeing his tomb, 
four shillings and twopence for his entertainment at the inn, and 
two shillings to the servants. Mr. Adams, on the contrary, ventured 
the bold remark that Shakspeare's wit, fancy, taste, and judgment, 
his knowledge of life, nature, and character, were immortal. 

Jefferson played his last piece upon the violin in Paris. Walking 
one day with a friend, four or five miles from home, absorbed in ear- 
nest conversation, he fell, and dislocated his right wrist. He grasped 
it firmly with his other hand, and, resuming the conversation, 
walked home in torture, of which his companion suspected nothing. 
It was unskilfully set ; and he never, as long as he lived, recovered 
the proper use of it, — could never again write with perfect ease, could 
never again play upon his instrument. Mr. Kandall remarks the 
curious fact, that, so inveterate had become the habit of entering his 
expenditures, he continued to record items that very afternoon, using 
his left hand. In' the morning, before the accident, he entered the 
payment to his steward, Petit, of five hundred and four francs for 
various household expenses, and in the afternoon, after the accident, 
in a hand more legible, records the expenditure of "24f. 10" for 
buttons, and "4 f. 6 " for gloves. The next day he was out again^ 
" seeing the king's library," for which he paid three francs. 

The wrist being weak and painful five months after the accident, 
the doctors " filled up the measure " of their absurdity by advising 
him to try the waters of Aix in Provence. He tried those waters, 
and, deriving no benefit from them, resumed his journey, and en- 
joyed an instructive and delightful four months' tour of France and 
Italy ; visiting especially the seaports, rice-districts, and regions 
noted for the culture of particular products. The cities, he says, he 
" naade a jo)) of, and generally gulped it all down in a day ; " but 
he was " never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, 



HIS TRAVELS IN EUEOPE. 315 

examining the culture and cultivators with a degree of curiosity 
which make some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser 
than I am." But he did not always find the towns so devoid of 
interest. It was upon this tour that he saw at Nismes the edifice 
which he had taken for a model for the Capitol at Richmond. " Here 
I am, madam," he wrote to one of his friends, " gazing whole houus 
at the Maison Quarree* like a lover at his mistress. The stock- 
ing-weavers and silk-spinners around it consider me a hypochondriac 
Englishman about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his his- 
tory. This is the second time I h&ve been in love since I left Paris. 
The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye-Epinaye in Beau- 
jolois, a delicious morsel of sculpture by M. A. Slodtz. This, you 
will say, was in rule, — to fall in love with a female beauty ; but with 
a house ! It is out of all precedent. No, madam, it is not without 
precedent in my own history." At Vienna he owns to having been 
in a rage on seeing a superb Eoman palace "defaced" and "hewed 
down " into a hideous utility. 

When he saw men working long hours and hard for forty cents a 
week, children toiling with the hoe, women carrying heavy loads, 
tending locks, striking the anvil, and holding the plough, he some- 
times made rather violent entries in his brief, hurried diary. Eor 
example, "Few chateaux, no farmhouses, all the people being gath- 
ered in villages. Are they thus collected by that dogma of their 
religion which makes them believe, that, to keep the Creator in 
good-humor with his own works, they must mumble a mass every 
day ? " 

The hopeless, helpless condition of the peasantry in some parts of 
France to which Nature had been most bountiful struck him to the 
heart again and agai3|/ It was his custom, as ho wandered among 
the farms and vineyards, to enter their abodes upon some pretext, 
and converse with the wives of the absent laborers. He would con- 

* This edifice still enchants every intelligent beholder. In the life of Mr. Thomas Brassey, 
by Sir Arthur Helps (London, 1872), is the following passage by the son of the great con- 
tractor : — 

" On our way from the station at Nismes to the hotel, we passed the Maison Quarree, so 
justly celebrated for the exquisite symmetry of its architectural proportions. I do not 
think he had heard much about this building, perhaps he might never have heard of it before ; 
but he immediately appreciated its great beauty, and remained .it least half an hour upon 
the spot, ia order that he might thoroughly examine that admirable monument of ancient 
art from every point of view. The excellent judgment in architectural art, and the sincere 
and unaflected cnjojnnent of the beautiful, which he displayed in the instance to which I 
have referred, made a strong impression ou my youthful mind." 



316 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 

trive to sit upon the bed, instead of tlie offered stool, in order to 
ascertain of what material it was made ; and he would peep on the 
sly into the boiling pot of grease and greens to see what was to be 
the family dinner. He had left Lafayette at Paris, deeply absorbed 
in the early movements of the coming revolution ; and he bogged 
fcim to come into the southern provinces, and see for himself what 
occasion there was for discontent. " To do it most eft'ectually," 
he said, "you must be absolutely incognito; you must ferret the 
people out of their hovels, as I have done ; look into their kettles ; eat 
their bread ; loll on their beds on pretence of resting yourself, but, in 
fact, to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in 
the course of this investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when 
you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their 
beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vege- 
tables." 

What a republican such scenes as these made of him ! How he 
came to hate, abhor, despise, and loathe the hereditary principle ! 
And all the more, because his post gave him the means of knowing 
the exact calibre of the hereditary kings and nobles who took from 
these faithful laborers nearly all their toil produced, and left them 
thistles and garbage for their own sustenance. " There is not a 
crowned head in Europe," he wrote to General Washington in 1788, 
" whose talents or merits w^ould entitle him to be elected a vestry- 
man by the people of America ; " and he gave it to the general as 
his opinion, that there was scarcely an evil known in Europe which 
could not be traced to the monarch as its source, " nor a good which 
was not derived from the small fibres of republicanism existing 
among them." 

The king of France he knew was a foolj^and the queen, at a 
moment when the fate of the monarchj^ seemed to hang upon a few 
millions more or less in the treasury, gratified to the full a mania 
for high play. The kings of Spain and of Naples knew but one 
interest in life, — the slaughter of birds, deer, and pigs. "They 
passed their lives in hunting, and despatched two couriers a week, 
one thousand miles, to let each other know what game they had 
killed the preceding days." The Successor to the great Frederick 
was "a mere hog in body and mind." George III. was a madman, 
and his son an animal of the same nature as the king of Prussia. 
According to Jefferson, England was as happy in her Prince of 



HIS TRAVELS IN EUROPE. 317 

Wales in 1789, as she is in 1874. A friend (probably the Duke 
of Dorset) described to him the behavior of the prince at a little 
dinner of four persons : — 

" He ate half a leg of mutton ; did not taste the small dishes be- 
cause small ; drank champagne and Burgundy as small beer during 
dinnei', and Bordeaux after dinner, as the rest of tlie company. 
Upon the whole, he ate as much as the other three, and drank about 
two bottle's of wine without seeming to feel it. . . . He has not a 
single element of mathematics, of natural or moral philosophy, or 
of any other science on earth ; nor has the society he has kept been 
such as to supply the void of education. It has been that of the 
lowest, most illiterate, and profligate persons in the kingdom. . . . 
He has not a single idea of justice, morality, religion, or of the 
rights of men, or any anxiety for the opinion of the world. He 
carries that indifference for fame so far, that he probably would not 
be hurt were he to lose his throne, provided he could be assured of 
having always meat, drink, horses, and women." 

Compared with the political system which placed such animals as 
these upon the summit of things, and made life burdensome, shame- 
ful, and bitter to nearly all but such, Jefferson thought the least 
good of the American governments a paragon of perfection. The 
very evils of democracy he learned to regard with a kind of favor. 
A little rebellion now and then, like that in Massachusetts in 1786, 
he thought, might be, upon the whole, beneficial. " It is true," he 
wrote, that "our governments want energy;" and this, he confessed 
was "an inconvenience." But "the energy which absolute govern- 
ments derive from an armed force, which is the effect of the bayonet 
constantly held at the breast of every citizen, and which resembles 
very much the stillnds3^of the grave, must be admitted also to have 
its inconveniences." The outrageous license of the London newspa- 
pers seemed to him an evil not greater than the suppressions and 
the perversions of the more shackled press of the Continent. He 
made an acute observation on this point to Thomas Paine in 1787, 
the truth of which every inhabitant of New York who has glanced 
over the newspapers during the last few years can attest : — 

" The licentiousness of the press produces the same effect which 
the restraint of the press was intended to do. If the restraint pre- 
vents things from being told, the licentiousness of the press j^revents 
things from being believed when they are told." 



CHAPTEE XXXVII. 

JEFFERSON AND THE FKENCH EEVOLUTION. 

Man proposes, woman disposes. Sucli is often the way of this 
world. Q 

In the summer of 1781^, James Madison, who was the man of all 
others most solicitous for the success of the new constitution of the 
United States, wrote to Jefferson asking him if he would accept an 
appointment at home in General Washington's administration. 
" You know," Jefferson replied, " the circumstances which led me 
from retirement, step by step, and from one nomination to another 
up to the present. My object is a return to the same retirement ; 
whenever, therefore, I quit the present, it will not be to engage in 
any other office, and most especially any one which would require a 
constant residence from home." A few months after these words 
were written, he was in New York, Secretary of State ; and it was a 
maiden of seventeen that brought him to it. 

His situation in Paris had become too interesting to leave, too 
pleasant to last. What man was ever more happily placed ? In 
the most delightful city of the earth, he held a post which put all its 
noblest resojarces at his command. His v^si^ was occupied with 
honorable duties which practice had made easy to him ; and the cir- 
cle of his friends was among the most agreeable the world has known 
since human beings first learned to converse politely with one 
another. In the houses which he most frequented, — that of the 
Lafayettes, for example, — he found all that was truly elegant and 
refined in the ancient manners, joined to the interest in knowledge 
and in the welfare of man that distinguished the new period. High 
thinking was, as it were, in vogue. Every man, woman, and child 
in Paris, Jeflerson said, had become a politician ; so that wherever 
be went he met people ardently desirous to listen to him as a master 
818 



JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 319 

in the science of human riglits. Nobles caught something of the new 
spirit; and rose superior to their rank. Simplicity and sincerity were 
recognized as the true elevation of manner. Jefferson, without think- 
ing of it, was quite in -the fashion when he finished a letter to Lafa- 
yette by saying, that, in America, people did not permit themselves to 
utter even truths when they had the air of flattery; and therefore 
he would say, once for all, " I love you, your wife, and children." 

He was on happy terms, too, with the diplomatic corps. Little as 
he had cause to love the realm of Britain, it was, nevertheless, with 
the British ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, that he was most inti- 
mate ; and his daughter struck up a girl's friendship with the duke's 
daugliter, that lasted beyond the term of their residence in Paris. 
The officers who had served in America were among the favorites in 
Paris society, and Jefferson's house was their natural rendezvous. 
That prince of gossips and story-tellers, Baron Grimm, was among 
his familiar acquaintances. Madame de Staiil, who was married 
during Jefferson's second year in Paris, he knew only as the daugh- 
ter of ISTecker and the brilliant young wife of the Swedish ambassa- 
dor. Among the lions who flourished in Paris at the time was De la 
Tude, who had been confined thirty-five years for writing an epigram 
upon Pompadour. " He comes sometimes," writes Jefferson, " to 
take a family soup with me, and entertains me with anecdotes of his 
five and thirty years' imprisonment. How fertile is the mind of 
man, which can make the Bastille and the dungeon of Vincennea 
yield interesting anecdotes ! " That " family soup " of his played a 
great part in his social life. He lived in the easy, liberal style of 
Virginia, which harmonized as well with the humor of the time as 
with his own character and habits. Pew set dinners, but a well- 
spread table alwaj^s open and generally filled ; no grand parties, but 
an evening circle that lured and detained the people fullest of the 
prevalent spirit. He had already the habit of mitigating business 
with dinner. If he had a difficult matter to conclude or discuss, it 
was usual with him to invite the parties interested to one of his 
light, rational, refreshing " family dinners," and afterwards, under 
its humanizing influence, introduce the troublesome topic. 

There were plenty of Americans in Paris, even at that early day ; 
that is, there were, perhaps, as many individuals as there are thou- 
sands now. " I endeavor to show civilities," he once wrote, " to all 
the Americans who come here ! " There might have been three or four 



320 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIST. 

in a month. Gouverneiir Morris was there during the Lnter ferments, 
shaking liis knowing head at' the French dream of a millennium, 
and arguing with Jefferson by the liour against every thing that the 
plenipotentiary most believed ; full of talk, self-confidence, and good- 
humor ; apt to be right in his predictions, because exempt from the 
longings to which the heavy-laden and anxious portion of the human 
race are subject. Hence, all his life, as often as the millennium 
failed to come to time, he had the noble satisfaction of saying, " I 
told you so." Poor Mazzei was much in Paris at this time, ruined 
by his endeavor to serve Virginia with Tuscan crowns during the 
Kevolutionary War, and now often compelled to figure in Jefferson's 
memorandum-book for French francs borrowed to supply his own 
necessities. Ledyard, the born traveller of Connecticut, came to the 
legation, poor and disappointed, incapable of remaining long in a 
place, plagued even from his boyhood with a mania to roam over the 
earth. He had sailed w'ith Cook, and revealed the tactless barbarity 
of that navigator; had seen on the western coast of North America 
the richest of all fur-bearing regions ; and had come to Paris to set 
on foot the enterprise which Astor attempted twenty-five j'ears after, 
when Astoria was founded. " But for the war of 1812," Astor used 
to say, " I should have been the richest man that ever lived ; " thus 
confirming Ledyard's view. Failing in his object, he was helpless 
in Paris ; and Jefierson chalked out a bold scheme for him, worthy of 
his singular genius for travelling. 

From his youth up, Jefferson had gazed from Monticello, wonder- 
ing what there might be between his mountain-top and the Pacific 
Ocean. It was an inherited curiosity ; for his own father had felt 
it, and, indeed, all intelligent Virginians, from the time when 
Captain John Smith sailed up the Chickahominy in qiiest of the 
South Sea. He now proposed to Ledyard to make his way through 
Russia to Kamtchatka ; thence by some chance vessel to Nootka 
Sound; and so, by one means or another, to what we now call 
Oregon ; and then strike into the wilderness, explore that vast 
unknown region, and endeavor to reach the western settlements of 
the United States, 

It was an audacious scheme, only fit for Ledyard, only possible to 
just such a man. He jumped at it. Through Baron Grimm, who 
was Own Correspondent in Paris to the Empress Catherine, Jeffer- 
son tried to obtain the requisite permission, which she, knowing the 



JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 321 

perils of the route, humanely refused ; and Ledyard started without 
it. Ragged, penniless, hungrj', gaunt, undaunted, he kept on, 
"kicked," as he wrote to Jefferson, "from town to town," and hop- 
ing " to be kicked round the world ; " until he was within two hun- 
dred miles of Kamtchatka, where an order from Catherine arrested 
him. He was brought back, and turned loose in Poland. It was 
reserved for President Jefferson to get our first knowledge of the 
boundless prairie world, through the explorations of his neighbor, 
friend, and secretarj^. Captain Meriwether Lewis. 

Mr. Hawthorne has told us, in his sly, humorous way, something 
of the odd projects and eccentric characters that solicit the notice of 
American representatives in Europe. Jefferson had his share of 
both. He saw, too, while living in Paris, how far-reaching the 
influence of the American Revolution was likely to be. He was 
among the first to hear of the agitation in the Spanish and Portu- 
guese colonies of America, that has since led to their deliverance 
from all their oppressors, except those twin despots of the tropical 
world, Indolence and Appetite. A mysterious note reached him in 
October', 1786, from which he only learned that the writer was a 
foreigner, who had " a matter of very great consequence " to com- 
municate, and wished him to indicate a safe channel. The plenipo- 
tentiary complied with the request. The letter arrived. " I am a 
native of Brazil," it began. " You are not ignorant of the frightful 
slavery under which my country groans. This continually becomes 
more insupportable since the epoch of your glorious independence." 
The Brazilians meant to rise, the writer continued, and they looked 
to the United States for support : he had come to France on purpose 
to say so to the plenipotentiary of the United States, because in 
America he could not act in the matter without exciting suspicion. 
If Mr. Jefferson desired further information, the writer could give it 
him. 

Meet me at Nismes, Mr. Jefferson replied in substance, whither 
he would go " under the pretext of seeing the antiquities of tha^ 
place." They met and conversed long. Jefferson reminded the 
Brazilian that he could only give him his ideas on the subject as an 
individual, having no authority to utter a word on behalf of Con- 
gress. Those ideas were, that the United States were not in a con- 
dition to take part in any war, and that they particularly wished to 
cultivate the friendship of Portugal, a country with which they had 
21 



322 LIFE or THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

an advantageous commerce. "But," lie added, ''a successful revo- 
lution in Brazil could not be uninteresting to us ; " and " prospects 
o{ lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to tlieir aid, 
and purer motives our officers ; " and citizens of the United States 
were free to leave their country whenever they wished. With this 
zold comfort the Brazilian was obliged to depart from Nismes, and 
leave Mr. Jefferson free to gaze with rapture upon the Malson 
Quarree. 

A similar series of mysterious approaches brought him, about the 
same time, face to face with a Mexican, whose country was also pre- 
paring to rise against its oppressors. In dealing with this gentle- 
man," the minister showed that he had picked up in Paris or 
elsewhere a little of the diplomatist's craft. " I was more cautious," 
he reports, " with the Mexican than with the Brazilian ; " and he 
threw cold water on his hopes by saying that he " feared tliey must 
begin hj enlightening and emancipating the minds of their people." 
No revolutionist likes to be met with an observation of that nature. 
"I was led into this caution," Jefferson explains, "by observing 
that this gentleman was intimate at the Spanish ambassador's," and 
that he was in the service of the Spanish government at the very 
time of making the communication. " He had much of the air of 
candor," adds the suddenlj^-forraed 'diplomatist; "but that can be 
borrowed, so that I was not able to decide about him iu my own 
mind." / 

All of which was reported at great length to Congress, with the 
additional intelligence that Peru, which had already lost two hun- 
dred thousand men in failure to eject tile hated Spaniards, could 
easily be roused to rebellion again. In one way, if in no other, Mr. 
Jefferson served Congress well : he provided them by every packet 
with long letters, which at that period, when journalism was but an 
infant art, must have been more interesting than we can now con- 
ceive, close packed as they were with information, curious, impor- 
tant, and new. 

It was not in far-off Peru, Mexico, or Brazil, that he saw the most 
memorable proofs of the mighty influence of the " glorious Revolu- 
tion " of which he had been a part. He witnessed the " glorious " 
part of the French Revolution, having been present at the Assembly 
of the Notables in 1787, and at the destruction of the Bastille in 
1789. His sympathy vfith that supreme effort of France to escape 



JEFFEESON AND THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION. 323 

the oppression of outgrown institutions was entire and profound, but 
it was also considerate and wise. Living in the most familiar 
intimacy with Lafayette and the other leaders of the preliminary 
movements, he knew every thing and influenced every thing they 
did; for at first, while as yet the king and the nation seemed in 
harmony, his official position was no restraint upon him ; and, to tlie 
last, his constant advice was. Save the monarchy ; France is not ripe 
for a republic ; get a constitution that will secure substantial liberty 
and essential rights, and wait for the rest. 

I suppose a good many of Mr. Carlyle's readers were a little 
offended at Buckle's sweeping assertion tliat no history of the French 
Revolution exists, and that no man had yet appeared who possessed 
the knowledge requisite for writing such a work. Mr. Carlyle's 
French Revolution seems only to lack the form and cadence of 
poetry to rank with the great poems of all time, the Iliad, the 
Inferno, Paradise Lost, and Faust. Dickens might well call it 
a " wonderful work." Its brevity and pictorial power are wonder- 
ful indeed; and a young reader who rises from its perusal pene- 
trated and awe-struck may be pardoned for thinking, that, among 
his other acquisitions, he has gained some insight into the French 
Revolution. He has gained every thing hut insight. Mr. Carlyle 
does not sacrifice the true to the picturesque : he gives us picture in 
lieu of truth. He has all a poet's love for the picturesque, and is 
more guided in his selection of events for relaiidn by their effective- 
ness than by their importance. Hence, as the antidotal Buckle 
remarks, we have a series of thrilling pictures, instead of that 
noblest and most difficult of all the products of the mind, a genuine 
history. 

The narrative of events written by Jefferson in extreme old age, 
brief, cold, and colorless as it is, taken in connection with his numer- 
ous letters, official and private, written at the time, will be prized by 
the individual who will, at length, evolve the French Revolution 
from the chaos of material in which it is now involved. Unfortu- 
nately, Jefferson went too far in extirpating his egotism. He was 
not vain enough ; he was curiously reticent concerning his own j)art 
in important events ; he instinctively veiled and hid his personality. 
But for this he might have found time, in his busy retirement, to 
compose a history of the Revolution down to the taking of the 
Bastille, which would have been of imperishable interest. It was 



324 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

not merely that he knew the men and witnessed the events; but he 
preserved his incredulitj^, accepted nothing upon mere rumor, and 
personally investigated occurrences. If a rumor reached him that 
"three thousand people had fallen in the streets," he and his secre- 
tary, Mr. Short, would go to the spot, and, after minute inquiry, 
reduce the number to "three." He was unwearied in sitting out 
the interminable sessions of the various asselnblies, and thought 
little of riding to Versailles "' to satisfy myself what has passed 
there, for nothing can be believed but what one sees or has from an 
eye-witness." 

Occasionally his part in events was conspicuous, usually it was 
unseen, always it was such as became the representative of the 
United States. On the gathering of the Notables in 1787, his 
advice to Lafayette was, Not to attempt too much ; to aim at secur- 
ing a recurrence of the Assembly ; to vote the king ample supplies 
in return for irreclaimable concessions ; to make the English consti- 
tution their model, not as the best conceivable, but the best attain- 
able. "If every advance," said he, "is to be purchased by filling 
the royal coffers with gold, it will be gold well employed." In the 
interval between the Assembly of the Notables of 1787, and the 
National Assembly of 1789, he was guide, philosopher, and friend 
to the liberal leaders; giving them numberless dinners and sound 
instruction in constitutional government; furnishing them with 
American precedents and English law-books, as well as with sum- 
maries and elucidations of his own. One darling object of the La- 
fayette party was to introduce trial by jury. It was Jefferson who 
supplied them with a list of works on the subject, and added a brief 
discourse, in which juries were justified on two grounds: 1, Because 
in every branch of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, 
an infusion of the people was necessary to the preservation of 
purity; 2, The chance of getting justice from a biassed judge was 
not as good as from a cast of the dice, but from a jury the chance 
was something better than from a cast of the dice. Hence, trial by 
jury was a good thing. 

The frightful winter of 1788-89, when the mercurj'- in Paris fell 
to twenty below zero; and the government was obliged to keep vast 
fires burning in the streets to preserve the poor from freezing; and 
every family that had any thing to spare was called upon for a 
weekly contribution for the purchase of food; and long queues of 



JEFFEESON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 325 

hunger-stricken women and cliilJren besieged every baker's shop; 
and, on cards of invitation to dinner, guests were requested to bring 
their own bread; and the king himself was self-limited to his proper 
Dumber of ounces, — this fearful season Jefferson was so happy as 
to be the means of mitigating to the people of France. In the 
autumn of 1787 it became known to the government that the supply 
of food was insufficient; and M. Necker asked the American minister 
to make the fact known in the United States, in order to stimulate 
the exportation of grain to France. Jefferson wrote to Mr. Jay 
on the subject, and Mr. Jay caused the letter to be inserted in the 
newspapers. The result was, that France received from America 
many thousand barrels of flour, — about thirty-five thousand, as it 
appears, — enough sensibly to lessen the distress, because the bulk 
of it arrived late, when the scarcity was extreme. 

Wild ]\[irabeau, acting upon imperfect information, and eager to 
make a point against the ministry, charged M, Necker, in one of his 
harangues, with having refused an offer of American flour made by 
the American minister. Jefferson hastened to defend the govern- 
ment, and contrived to set M. Necker right with the public, witliout 
offending Mirabeau. The orator read Jefferson's exculpatory letter 
to the Assembly, and apologized for the error. 

We have seen how susceptible Jefferson was to the spell of ora- 
tory, from the time when, as a boy, he had listened in rapture to the 
moonlight oration of an Indian chief in the Virginia woods, to the 
period when the eloquence of Patrick Henry charmed and amazed 
him in the House of Burgesses. And now, in Paris, he owned the 
resistless power of Mirabeau, of whose singular fascination he re- 
tained the liveliest recollection as long as he listed. William Wirt 
and Henry Clay both testified to having heard Mr. Jefferson speak 
of the sway of that strange being over the minds of men of every 
class. " He spoke of him," saj'^s Wirt, " as uniting two distinct and 
perfect characters in himself, whenever he pleased : tlie mere logi- 
cian, with a mind apparently as sterile and desolate as the sands of 
Arabia, but reasoning at such times with an Herculean force which 
nothing could resist; at other times, bursting out with a flood of. 
eloquence more sublime than Milton ever imputed to the cherubim 
and seraphim, and bearing all before him." 

At the supreme moment of the Revolution, in July, 1789, the 
National Assembly paid homage, at once to the American people 



326 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

and to their representative. They appointed a committee to draught 
a constitution, the chairman being the Archbishop of Bordeaux ; 
and this committee formally invited the American minister to assist 
at their sessions, and favor them with his advice. But, as it was to 
the king that the plenipotentiary was accredited, he was obliged to 
decline. He was not, however, to escape so easily. When the con- 
stitution was under discussion in the Assembly, article by article, 
differences of opinion arose which debate could not reconcile, because 
the opinion of one powerful faction was prompted and supported by 
interest. Two questions rent the Assembly, at length, into hostile 
parties : 1, Shall the Icing have a veto? 2, Shall there be hereditary 
legislators in France ? The nobility put forth all their energies, and , 
used all their arts, to have both these vital questions answered aflBrm- 
atively. The popular party were not united on either question ; 
and hence there was wide-spread fear that the solid, small plialanx 
of the aristocracy would wrest the constitution to the perpetuation 
of their power. 

In the midst of this alarm, Jefferson received a note from Imfa- 
yette, informing him that he should, the next day, bring a party of 
six or eight friends to dine with him. The hospitable Virginian re- 
plied that they would be welcome ; and, at the time named, the party 
arrived, — just eight' in all, including Lafaj'^ette. They proved to be 
leaders on the po^Dular side, devoted to the cause, but unable to agree 
on the two dividing questions ; and Lafayette, taking a hint from the 
usual tactics of Jefferson, and forgetting his official character, had 
brought them together in this way for a friendly conference. The 
dinner passed. The cloth being removed, wine, according to the cus- 
tom of old Virginia, was for the first time jilaced upon the table. 
First eat, then drink, appears to have been the Virginian order. 
Lafayette introduced the subjects upon which an interchange of 
opinion Avas desired, reminded them of the state of things in the 
Assembly, and dwelt upon the deadly peril of the new-born liberty 
of France so long as the enemies of liberty were united and its 
friends divided. " I have my opinion," said he ; " but I am ready 
to sacrifice it to that of my brethren in the same cause." Some 
common conclusion, he said, they must reach, and stand to, or the 
nobility would carry all before them ; and, whatever they might now 
agree upon, he pledged himself to maintain at the head of the 
National Guard. 



JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 327 

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when Lafayette ceased to 
speak, and it was ten iii the evening when the conference ended. 
During those six hours, Jefferson says, " I was a silent witness to a 
coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political 
opinion ; to a logical reasoning and chaste eloquence, disfigured by 
no gaud}^ tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being 
placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity." The 
expedient was successful. Under the happy influence of Jefferson's 
early, rational dinner, not wholly vitiated by the light v/ines which, 
he had personally sought among the vineyards of France and Italy, 
and with minds at once calmed and exalted by his silent, sympa- 
thetic presence, the deputies, at last, discovered ground upon which 
they covdd all stand. They agreed tliat the king should have a sus- 
pensive veto, and that there should be no hereditary legislators. 
France should be governed, thenceforth, by a constitutional king, 
and by one legislative body, — the latter elected by the people. 
Rallying upon these two principles, the liberal party presented a 
solid front to the aristocrats, and thus controlled the Revolution as 
long as it was controllable. 

During this conference, the plenipotentiary had sat " silent " at 
the head of his table ; nor had he had any part in causing the 
meeting to be held in his house. Nevertheless, he felt that the eti- 
quette of his position had been violated ; and, consequently, the 
next morning lie went to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and ex- 
plained the circumstances. The information was superfluous. The 
minister, who, as Jefferson intimates, was in the confidence of the 
patriots, had already learned what had passed, and had approved the 
conference before it was held. He said, that, so far from taking 
umbrage at the use to which Jefferson's house had been put, he 
earnestly wished that he would habituallj'' attend such conferences, 
because he was sure he would moderate the warmer spirits, and pro- 
mote attainable reforms only. Jefferson replied, that he knew too 
well the duties he owed to the king, to France, and to the United 
States, to meddle with the internal affairs of the country; and he 
should preserve careiully the attitude of a neutral and passive spec- 
tator, except that his heart's desire would ever be for the prevalence 
of measures most beneficial to the nation. 

During these intense weeks, Jefferson had a foretaste of what he 
was to experience soon in New York and Philadelphia. He discov- 



828 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

ered that a man niiglit be an American, a patriot, and a person of 
great ability and worth, and yet not sympathize at all with this 
mighty and hopeful movement. Almost every day or two Gonver- 
neur Morris dropped in at the legation for a dinner and a chat with 
the minister; differing from him in opinion, in sentiment, in sym- 
pathy, yet glad of the information he obtained from him, and well 
affected towards him personally. Marie the difference between the 
humane and the tory mind : Morris instinctively took sides with 
the hated aristocrats, associated chiefly with them, lamented their 
downfall, sympathized deeply with them in all their alarms and sor- 
rows. When he saw the queen of France pass unsaluted by a sin- 
gle voice, he could not help calling upon the by-standers to give her 
a cheer ; and only refrained himself from raising the cry, because he 
remembered in time that he was not a Frenchman. He honestly 
bewailed the spectacle of the " high Austrian spirit " abased to the 
point of the queen's bowing low in acknowledgment of one faint 
cheer. He exulted when the king showed for a moment the fierte 
which he deemed proper to " the Bourbon blood." He sent a letter 
of advice to the queen ; and, at a later day, pressed uj)on the exiled 
Duke of Orleans a loan of fifteen hundred pounds. Such men as 
he are so constituted, that the brief and shallow distress of a 
wealthy and picturesque family brings tears to their eyes, while they 
can calmly accept as inevitable doom the desolation and hopeless 
anguish of whole provinces of unornamental people. Their sympa- 
thies are genuine and acute, but limited. Burke, doubtless, was 
sorry that France was unhappy ; but the downfall and death of one 
picturesque woman tore his heart, and unsettled his mind. 

'' What is the queen disposed to do in the present situation of 
things ? " Jefferson supposes some one to ask in this same summer of 
1789. He answers the question thus : *' Whatever rage, pride, and 
fear can dictate in a breast which never knew the presence of one 
moral restraint." . Again he writes, " The queen cries, and sins on." 
That is, as Madame Campan explains, she had a woman's passion for 
deep play; and there was no one in France \vho,could stay her hand, 
no one who could keep her from squandering thousands at a sitting. 
Ministers lamented, that, at such a crisis, France for the first time 
in ages should be cursed with a king who had the mania to live 
without a mistress, — a thing extremely inconvenient in a despotic 
court, where it makes the queen king. A virtuous man has no chance 



JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 329 

whatever with such a wife as that. Let him be neglectful, contempt- 
uous, dissolute ; let him put upon her the ignominy of an avowed 
mistress ; let him be a Louis XV. instead of a Louis XVI., — and 
she is as submissive as a lamb. '' This angel, as gaudily painted in the 
rhapsodies of Burke," wrote Jefferson forty years after, " witli some 
smartness of fancy, but no sound sense, was proud, disdainful of 
restraint, indignant at all obstacles to her will, eager in the pursuit 
of jileasure, and firm enough to hold to her desires, or perish in their 
wreck. Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, witli tliose of the 
Count d'Artois and others of her clique, had been a sensible item 
in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the re- 
forming hand of the nation ; and her opposition to it, her inflexible 
perverseness and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine, drew 
the king on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calam- 
ities which will forever stain the pages of modern history. I have 
ever believed, that, had there been no queen, there would have been 
no revolution. No force would have been provoked or exercised." 
He adds, that he would not have voted for the execution of the sover- 
eign. He would have shut the queen up i*! a convent, and deprived 
the king only of irresponsible and arbitrar3'' power. 

IVforris, on the contrary, throws the blame of the subsequent hor- 
rors — including both Robespierre and Bonaparte — upon the de- 
sti'uction of the nobility; and, in this opinion, he lived and died. He 
wrote thus in his diary, after getting home one evening from Jeffer- 
son's house : " Mr. Jefferson and I differ in our systems of politics. 
He, with all the leaders of liberty here, is desirous of annihilating 
distinctions of order. How far such views may be right respecting 
mankind in general is, I think, extremelj' problematical. But, with 
respect to this nation, I am sure it is wrong, and cannot eventuate 
well." On the Fourth of July, Mr. Jefferson entertained a large 
party of Americans at dinner, among whom and of whom were M. 
and Madame de Lafaj'^ette. Morris, after dinner, urged Lafayette to 
preserve, if possible, some constitutional power to the body of the 
.nobles, "as the only means of preserving any liberty to the peo- 
ple." Happy the Morris who records in his diary such a remark 
as this, on the eve of such a period as France was entering in the 
summer of 1789. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

RETURNING TO THE UNITED STATES. 

Placed m the midst of all tins stir and effervescence, while as 
yet every thing wore a hopeful aspect, — the Bastille in ruins, the 
people easily triumphant everywhere, and the aristocrats acquiescent, 
submissive, or in flight, — we cannot wonder that Jefferson found 
his situation, as he said, too interesting to abandon. He had no 
thought of abandoning it. Nevertheless, an evout had occurred in 
his household which made it necessary for him to visit Virginia for 
a short time ; and while the Bastille was tumbling, he was impa- 
tiently waiting for the arrival of a six-months' leave of absence for 
which he had applied. And there was a member of his family who 
was waiting for it, perhaps, more impatiently than himself. 

When he left Virginia, in 1784, he had three children, — Martha, 
• twelve, years of age ; Mary, six ; and Lucy, two. The eldest he 
took with him to Paris, where he placed her at a convent school ; 
and the two others he left in Virginia under the care of their aunt, 
Mrs. Eppes. A few weeks after his arrival in Paris, the intelligence 
reached him that his youngest daughter, Lucy, a strangely interest- 
ing child, had died of whooping-cough, after a week of acute suffer- 
ing. After this cutting stroke he began to long for the coming of 
her sister, whom he wished to have educated in Paris. But she was 
ofte of the most clingingly affectionate of all children ; resembling 
those vines which we sometimes find in the woods, which cast 
adhesive tendrils round every object they toiich, and can scarcely 
be disengaged without breaking. She could not hear of leaving 
her Virginia home without such distress as made her aunt shudder 
at the thought of sending her away. Her father tried to accus- 
tom her mind to the idea of leaving ; telling her that he and 
her sister IVIartha could not live without her, and that he would 
330 



EETUENING TO THE UNITED STATES. 331 

soon bring her back to her uncle, aunt, and cousins, whom she was 
so sorry to leave. " You shall be taught here," he wrote, " to play 
on tlie harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French, and 
such other things as will make you more worthy of the love of your 
friends." To this he added a temptation more alluring: "You shall 
have as many dolls and playthings as you want for yourself, or to 
send to your cousins." He concludes with all the good advice that 
tender and thoughtful fathers give, with some items less usual : 
"Never beg for any thing," and, "remember, too, as a constant 
charge, not to go out without your bonnet, because it will make you 
very ugly, and then we shall not love jou. so much." 

The little girl could not be tempted. She scrawled a brief reply, 
in which she said that she longed to see her father and her sister, 
but, '• I am sorry you have sent for me. I don't want to go to France ; 
I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes." In two postscripts she 
strove to impress the same lesson upon her father's mind : " I want 
to see 3'ou and Sister Patsy ; but you must come to Uncle Eppes's 
house." The father, however, insisted, because, as he said, his 
reason told him that the dangers were not great, and the advantages 
to the child would be considerable. But she must not sail till just 
the right vessel offered, — a good ship, not too new and not too 
old, — nor until the right person was found to take charge of her. 
" A careful negro woman, as Isabel for instance, if she has had the 
small-pox, would suffice under the patronage of a gentleman." 
When he had mentioned every precaution that the most anxious 
fondness could suggest, he was still tormented with visions of new 
dangers. His long and fruitless negotiations with the Algerines 
called up the most horrible of all his apprehensions. Suppose she 
were taken into captivity by those pirates, who had already driven 
the American flag froni the Mediterranean, and menaced American 
commerce in every part of the ocean ! The thought preyed upon 
his mind to such a degree, that he wrote one letter to IVIr. Eppes for 
no other purpose than to beg him once more not to confide the child 
to an American ship, but " to a French or English vessel having a 
Mediterranean pass." The possible peril of his daughter was a 
stimulant to his diplomatic exertions ; and he told Mr. Eppes, that, if 
a peace were concluded with the Algerines, he should be among the 
first to hear it. " I pray you," he added, " to believe it from 
nobody else." 



332 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

These precautions were not needless; for wliile the child was 
upon the ocean, in the spring of 1787, a Virginia ship going to 
Spain was attacked by a corsair. After an action of an hour and a 
quarter, the Virginians boarded and took her, bound the pirates 
with the shackles themselves would have worn if the battle had 
gone the other way, and so carried them to Virginia. Well might 
the father say, when he knew that she had sailed, "I shall try not- 
to think of Polly till I hear that she has landed." 

He did think of her, however, constantly ; and he endeavored to 
prepare his elder daughter for the duties which the coming of so 
young a sister would devolve upon her. " She will become," he 
wrote to her, "a j^recious charge upon j^our hands. The difference 
of your age, and your common loss of a mother, will put that office 
upon you. Teach her, above all things, to be good, because without 
that we can neither be valued by others, nor set any value on our- 
selves." In his advice to his children and nephews, this truth is 
often repeated : " If ever you find yourself in any difficulty, and 
doubt how to extricate yourself, do ivhat is right, and you will find 
it the easiest way of getting out of the difficulty." And, again, to 
his nephew, Peter Carr: "Give up money, give up fame, give up 
science, give the earth itself, and all it contains, rather than do 
an immoral act. And never suppose, that, in any possible situation 
or any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing." 

She was really coming at length, though to the last moment, she 
clung with all her little heart to her home. No promises, no strata- 
gems, availed to reconcile her to going away. The ship lay at 
anchor in the river. Her cousins all went on board with her, and 
remained a day or two, playing about the deck and cabins, and 
making the ship seem like another home. Then using the device 
by which Pocahontas had been taken prisoner in the same waters a 
hundred and seventy years before, they all left the ship one day 
while she was asleep ; and she awoke to find the sails spread, the 
familiar shore vanished, her cousins gone, and only her negro maid 
left of the circle of her home. Her affections then gathered about 
the captain of the vessel, to whom she became so attached, that part- 
ing with him, too, was agony. Mrs. Adams received her in London, 
where she remained two weeks, and won the heart of that estimable 
lady. " A finer child of her age I never saw," wrote Mrs. Adams. 
"So mature an understanding, so womanly a behavior, and so 



EETURNING TO THE UNITED STATES. * 333 

much sensibility united, are rarely to be met with. I grew so fond 
of her, and she was so much attached to me, that, when Mr. Jeffer- 
son sent for her, they were obliged to force the little creature 
away." 

It was a strange meeting in Paris between father and child, and 
between sister and sister. Martha, then a tall and elegant girl of 
fifteen, had a week's holiday from the convent to meet her sister. 
The little girl did not know either of them, nor would they have 
known her. But they were both enchanted with her. Besides 
being a girl of singular and bewitching beauty both of form and 
face, she was one of the most artless, unselfish, and loving creatures 
that ever blessed and charmed a home. Her father was abundantly 
satisfied with " her reading, her writing, and her manners in gene- 
ral ; " and he poured forth eloquent gratitude to Mrs. Eppes for the 
patient goodness which had borne such fruit in the character and 
mind of his child. During the week's holiday, Martha took her 
sister occasionally to the convent, showed her its pleasant gardens 
and inviting apartments^ familiarized her with the place, which, as 
they all thought, was to be her abode for some years. At the end 
of the week the new-comer went to the convent to reside, where as 
" Mademoiselle Polie " she soon became a universal favorite. 

Both sisters learned to speak French almost immediately, and 
soon spoke it as easily as they did English ; while the three adult 
members of the family, Humphries, Short, and Jefferson, when they 
had been two years in Paris, got on in speaking French not much 
better than when they landed. So, at least, Jefferson says in one 
of his letters. It does require about two years to begin to be at 
home in a foreign language ; but, when you have reached a certain 
point, familiarity seems to come all at once. 

The parent who keeps a daughter at a good specimen of a con- 
vent school for more than two years may count upon her having a 
fit of desire to become a nun ; unless, indeed, the girl has much 
more or much less understanding than the average. These daugh- 
ters of Mr. Jefferson were conscientious, affectionate, and sympa- 
thetic, lovers of tranquillity, of strong local attachments ; but they 
were not exceptionally endowed with intellect. One day in the 
spring of 1789, he received a letter from Martha, in which she 
informed him of her wish to pass her days in the convent in the ser- 
vice of religion. At any time this would have been a startling 



834 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

announcement to such a father ; but particuhxr circumstances greatly 
increased its effect upon him. 

Among the young Americans who had been studying in European 
universities during Jefferson's residence in Paris, was a cousin of 
his own, Thomas Mann Randolph, known to the public in later 
years as member of Congress and governor of Virginia. In 1788 he 
left the University of Edinburgh, and, before returning to Virginia, 
made the usual tour of Europe, lingering several weeks at the lega- 
tion in Paris, where he renewed his acquaintance with Martha Jeffer- 
son. The little playmate of his boyhood had grown to be a beautiful 
girl of sixteen; and she, on her part, saw the black-haired*boy of her 
early recollections transformed into a tall, alert young man, fluent 
in conversation, and of distinguished bearing. From slight indica- 
tions in Jefferson's letters of this year, I infer that the j'outh pro- 
posed to the father for the hand of the daughter; and that Jefferson, 
while approving the match and consenting to it, had not disturbed 
the school-girl's mind by making the offer known to her. Young 
Randolph sailed for Virginia in the fall of 1788 ; and the plenipoten- 
tiary, a few weeks after, applied for leave of absence, for the purpose 
of taking his daughters home. But at home the old government 
was going out, and a new government was coming in ; and this was 
the reason Vfhy the leave asked for in November, 1788, did not 
reach Paris till late in the summer of 1789. During this interval it 
was that Mr. Jefferson received the letter from his daughter which 
notified him of her desire to espouse the Church. . 

He managed this difficult case with prompt and successful tact. 
He allowed a day or two to pass without noticing the letter. He 
drove to the convent on the third morning, and, after explaining and 
arranging the matter with the abbess, asked for his daughters. 
He received them with somewhat more warmth and tenderness than 
usual. Without uttering a word of explanation, he simply told 
them that he had come to take them away from school. As soon as 
they were ready, they entered the carriage, and were driven home, 
where they continued their education under masters ; and neither 
then nor ever did a word pass between father and daughter on the 
subject of her letter. The dream of romantic and picturesque self- 
annihilation was soon dissipated in the healthy air and honest light 
of her father's houf^e. She accepted her destiny with the joyous 
blindness of youth ; and instead of the self-abnegation of the con- 



BETUENING TO THE UNITED STATES. 335 

vent, so easy and so flattering, she led a life of self-denial whicli 
was not romantic nor picturesque, but homely and most real. 

Late in August, 1789, the tardy leave of absence arrived, and the 
family hastened to conclude their preparations for the voyage. 
There was not much to do. Every thing at the legation was to be 
left unchanged, in the care of Mr. Short, who was to be the official 
charge till Mr. Jefferson returned. To the last hour of his stay, 
this most zealous, faitliful, and vigilant of ministers continued to 
render timely and fortunate services to his country's commerce with 
France, which had grown under his fostering touch frond next to 
nothing to 'something considerable. Tt had been happy for him, 
perhaps, if he had not gone to America then. In Paris he was in 
harmony with the prevailing tone. In Paris his fitness for his 
place was curiously complete. In Paris he was sole of his kind, — 
admired, believed in, trusted, liked, beloved. In Paris, with an 
ocean between him and New York, he might have said No to the 
invitation the acceptance of which changed the current of his life. 
But it was in his destiny to go, and go he must. 

His iis'e years' life in Paris had done much for his general culture, 
and more for his particular training as a public man. He had 
become a swift, cool, adroit, thoroughly trained, and perfectly accom- 
plished minister; and this without ceasing to be a man and a 
citizen, without hardening and narrowing into the professional 
diplomatist, without losing his interest or his faith in mankind. 
We have seen how deeply he was moved, on his arrival in Europe, 
by the condition of the people; nineteen-twentieths of the whole 
population, as he rashly computed, being more wretched and more 
hopeless than the most miserable being who could be found in all 
the length and breadth of America. These first impressions were 
never effaced. When he had spent years in Europe, his disap- 
proval of its political system — hereditjiry rank and irresponsible 
power — remained passionate and unspeakable. Whenever, in his 
letters or other writings of the time, he touches that theme, his 
style rises, intensifies, warms; his words become short and simple, 
his similes homely and familiar; every phrase betrays heartfelt 
conviction. 

In his numerous contributions of material for the Encyclojiidie 
and similar works, he had evidently tried to get into them as much 
of the genuine republican essence as the censor could be expected 



336 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

to admit. It liad been his delight to explain the state of things in 
America, where, as he said, no distinction between man and man 
had ever been known, except that conferred by office ; where '"' the 
poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest million- 
naire, and generally on a favored one whenever their rights seemed 
to jar;" where "a shoemaker or other artisan, removed by the 
voice of his country into a chair of office, instantly commanded all 
the respect and obedience which the laws ascribe to his office ; " 
where, "of distinction by birth or badge, the people had no more 
idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or 
planets;" having merely heard there were such, and knowing they 
must be wrong. Hence, he said, that due horror of the evils 
flowing from that barbaric system could only be excited in Europe, 
where "the dignity of man is lost in arbitrary distinctions, where 
the human species is classed into several stages of degradation, 
where the many are crushed under the weight of the few, and where 
the order established can present no other picture than that of God 
Almighty and his angels trampling under foot the host of the 
damned." 

Such utterances as these — and they abound in his Paris letters 
— were penned before Buncombe County in North Carolina had 
been " laid off"." They grew from the native elevation of his mind. 
They attest his high-breeding, as well as his humanity and good 
sense. The gentleman speaks in them, as well as the citizen; for 
to be an American citizen, and not feel so, is to be of the Vulgar. 

But, in those days, no American could boast of his country's 
freedom, without laying himself open to a taunt. Did Jeff"erson 
forget that the laborers of his own State were slaves, wlien he 
vaunted the equality of its people ? Not always. He confessed 
the shame of it; he foretold the ruin enclosed within it. "What 
an incomprehensible machine is man!" he exclaims, "who can 
endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vin- 
dication of his own liberty, and, the next moment, be deaf to all 
those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and 
inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught 
with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to 
oppose!" But, then, he threw the burden of delivering the slaves 
of Virginia upon that convenient resource of self-indulgent mortals, 
"Providence." An "overruling Providence," he thought, would at 



EEtURNING TO THE UNITED STATES. 337 

length effect wliat the masters of Virginia ought at once to do. 
When the measure of the slaves' tears should be full, then " a God 
of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and 
liberality among their oppressors, or, at length, by his exterminat- 
ing thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and 
that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality." 

To the moment of his departure from Europe, we find him still a 
warm lover of France, and devoted to the alliance between the two 
countries. The last letter which he wrote to Madison in Paris con- 
tains a passage on the alliance, which, coming from the( placid 
Jefferson, we may almost call fiery : — 

" When, of two nations, the one has engaged herself in a ruinous 
war for us, has spent her blood and money to save us, has opened 
her bosom to us in peace, and received us almost on the footing of 
her own citizens; while the other has moved heaven, earth, and hell 
to exterminate us in war, has insulted us in all her councils in 
peace, shut her doors to us in every port vhere her interests would 
admit it, libelled us in foreign nations, endeavored to poison them 
against the reception of our most precious commodities, — to place 
these two nations on a footing is to give a great deal more to one 
than to the other, if the maxim be true, that to make unequal quan 
titles equal, you must add more to one than to the other. To say, 
in excuse, that gratitude is never to enter into the motives of 
national conduct, is to revive a princij)le which has been buried foi 
centuries with the kindred princij^les of the lawfulness of assassina- 
tion, poison, and peijury. ... I know but one code of morality 
for men, whether acting singly or collectively." 

Such was his feeling with regard to France and England in 1789 
before there were '* Galileans " or "Anglicans," still less '' Galloma- 
niacs " or " Anglomaniacs," among his countrymen. 

And, since I am endeavoring to show what manner of mind 
Thomas Jefferson brought back with him to his native land in 1789, 
I must allude to another matter. He carried his view of the rights 
of the individual mind to an extreme, which, in that age, had few 
supporters in his own country. His moral system was strict ; his 
" doxy " was startlingly lax. The advice he gave his nephews on 
these points, when they were college students, might be summed up 



338 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSO^T. 

in words like these : Perfect freedom of thinking, but no other free- 
dom ! To do right and feel humanely, we are hound : it is an honor- 
able bondage, and he is noblest who is most submissive to it; but, in 
matters of opinion, it is infamy not to be free. These sentences, 
among others, he addressed to Peter Carr in college in 1787 : — 

"Religion. In the first place, divest 3'onrself of all bias in favor 
of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them on any other 
subject rather than that of religion. On the other hand, shake off 
all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are 
servilely crouched. Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her 
tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even 
the existence of a God ; because, if there be one, he must more 
approve of the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. You 
will naturally examine, first, the religion of your own country. 
Read the Bible, then, as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, 
in the Book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several 
hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus, we should 
class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, etc. 
But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine, 
therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his having been in- 
spired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions 
believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to know 
how contrary it is to the law of nature. You will next read the 
New Testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus, Keep 
in your eye the opposite pretensions : 1, Of those who say he was 
begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws 
of nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven ; and, 2, Of those 
who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, 
enthusiastic mind, who set out with pretensions to divinit3'-, ended 
in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition, by being 
gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first 
commission of that offence by whipping, and the second by exile, or 
death in f area. See this law in Digest, lib. 48, tit. 19, If 28, 3, and 
Lipsius, lib. 2, de cruce, cap. 2. Do not be frightened from this 
inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that 
there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort 
and pleasantness you will feel in its exercise, and the love of others 
which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a 



BETUENING TO THE UNITED STATES. 339 

God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he 
approves you, will be a vast additional incitement : if that Jesus 
was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. 
Your own reason is the only oracle given you by Heaven ; and you are 
answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness, of the decision." 

Such sentiments as these, which he cherished as long as he lived, 
were familiar enough then to the educated class of the U nited 
States, as of Christendom generally ; but they were seldom stated 
with such uncompromising bluntness as in the passage from which 
these sentences are selected. He disposed of subtler questions in 
the same letter with equal abruptness : " Conscience is as much a 
part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings 
in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them 
in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise^ as 
may any particular limb of the body." 

His long residence in a metropolis had not freed his mind from 
some provincial prejudices. He shared the common opinion of that 
age, that virtue was a product of the country, rather than the town, 
and that farmers were better citizens than mechanics or merchants. 
He spoke occasionally of mechanics as a class disposed to turbu- 
lence, as if he had derived his knowledge of them from Shak- 
speare's Julius Caesar, rather than from the workshops of his own 
time. He hoped the period was remote when manj'- of his country- 
men would be employed in manufactures ; which he evidently 
regarded, with Franklin, as a kind of necessary evil, or last resource 
of an over-populated country. But his special aversion was mer- 
chants. " Merchants," he wrote, " are the least virtuous citizens, 
and possess the least amor patriot}.''^ The reason why Ehode Island 
was so difficult, and Connecticut so easj^, to be brought to consent 
to reasonable measures, he thought, was this : In Connecticut there 
was scarcely a man who was not a farmer, and in E-hode Island 
almost every one was a merchant. All this, which savors of the 
country gentleman, seems to us of the present day crude and erro- 
neous. Khode Island might well pause, in 1787, before surrendering 
control of the business to which she owed her whole subsistence. Ob- 
serve a one-eyed man, when splinters are flying, with what anxious 
vigilance he guards the organ which alone saves him from a life- 
time's darkness. Ehode Island's commerce was like that last charge 



-340 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

in David Crocket's rifle, wben Le and the bear were eying one 
another across the brook. 

Such a man was Thomas Jefferson on his departure from France. 
He had his limits, of course; he had his foibles; he had his faults. 
But the sum of his worth as a human being was very great ; and he 
had more in him of that which makes the glory and hope of Amer- 
ica than any other living t^reature known to us. American prin- 
cif)les he more than believed in : he loved them, and he deemed 
their prevalence essential to the welfare of man. 

What a plague it was to get across the sea eighty j^ears ago ! 
With trunks packed (and their trunks, as Jefferson intimates, were 
of American number and magnitude), the little family sat at home 
waiting a whole month for a ship ; and, after all, they could do no 
better than charter one in London to take them in at the Isle of 
Wight. It was a month of alarm in Paris. The harvest had not 
relieved the scarcity of food ; long queues of hungry people streamed 
still from every baker's shop ; and the government itself, perishing 
of inanition, was obliged to spare a million a week to keep down the 
price of bread in Paris. Even in that dire extremity, the Protective 
System shut the ports of France against the food for want of which 
Frenchmen were djnng ; and Jefferson spent his last days, and even 
his last hours, in Paris, in trying to persuade the Ministry , to ^ermii 
the importation of salted provisions from the United States 1 Salt 
beef, objected the Count de Montmorin, will give people the scurvy. 
No, replied Jefferson : we eat it in America, and don't have the 
scurvy. The salt-tax will fall off, said the minister. Jefferson 
could not deny that it might a little ; but, on the other hand, it 
would relieve the government from the necessity of keeping the 
price of bread below its value. But, resumed the Count, the people 
of France will not buy salt meat. Then, replied Jefferson, the 
merchants won't import it, and no harm will be done. And you 
cannot make a good soup of it, urged the Count. True, said Jeffer- 
son, but it gives a delightful flavor to vegetables. Besides, it will 
cost only half the price of fresh meat. He convinced the Count de 
Montmorin, who requested him to propose the measure to M. 
Necker. But, as he was summoned to join the ship, he could only 
argue it briefly in a letter to M. Necker, which he left for Mr. Short 
to deliver and enforce. August 26th, the day on which this letter 
was written, he and his daughters left Paris for Havre. 



EETTJRNING TO THE UNITED STATES. 341 

He might as well have waited a while longer. They were de- 
tained at Havre ten days, during which he was so fortunate as to 
effect another practicable breach in the Protective System. Ameri- 
can ships bringing cargoes to Havre, found nothing to take from 
Havre, sometimes, except salt ; but salt could only be bought " at 
a mercantile price," at places on the Loire and Garonne, away 
round on the Biscay side of France, involving six or eight hun- 
dred miles of difficult and perilous coasting. He now obtained 
from the farmers-general a concession, by which American ships 
could load with salt at Honfleur, opposite Havre, paying only mer- 
cantile rates. It made a nice finish to his diplomatic career, — this 
valuable service to the merchants and mariners of his country. 

Ten days further detention at Cowes gave the young ladies an 
opportunity to ride about the Isle of Wight, to peep into the deep 
well at Carisbrooke Castle, and stare at the window in the ruins 
out of which Charles I. looked when he was a prisoner there, per- 
haps with comments on the character of the decapitated from their 
father. Mr. Pitt, it appears, had the politeness to send an order to 
Cowes, exempting the baggage of the voyagers from search, an 
attention which Miss Jefferson remembered with gratitude, she 
being the member of the party who was most obliged. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

HIS WELCOME HOME. 

Twenty-three days of swift sailing and perfect autumn weather 
brought the ship into a dense fog off the coast of Virginia. For 
three days the thick November mist clung to the shore, preventing 
the captain from getting a glimpse of either cape. At length; 
trusting only to his calculations, in which, doubtless, a mathemat- 
ical plenipotentiary had taken part, he stood in boldly, and escaped 
into Chesapeake Bay, with only a graze and a scare, just in time to 
avoid a storm that kept some companion vessels a month longer at 
sea. This, however, was but the beginning of mishaps. In 
beating up to Norfolk against the rising gale, they were run into 
by a vessel rashing seaward before the wind, and lost part of their 
rigging. At Norfolk, two hours after the passengers had landed, 
and before anj of their effects had been taken ashore, the ship 
caught fire. The flames gained sudi headway, that the captain 
was on the point of scuttling the vessel. But at last, through the 
exertions of every sailor in port, the fire was got under, without 
damage to the papers of the minister or the aaintier effects of 
his daughters. Nothing saved them but the thickness of the trunks ; 
for the heat was so great in the state-rooms, that the powder in a 
musket standing in one of them was silently consumed. 

Norfolk, which had been burned to the last house during the war, 
was little more than a village of shanties when Jefferson and his 
daughters landed there, November 18, 1789. They would have been 
puzzled to find shelter, as the only inn in the town was full, but 
for the generosity of its inmates, who insisted on giving up their 
rooms to them. On the very day of his landing, Jefferson read in a 
newspaper that President Washington had appointed him secretary 
of state. " I made light of it," he wrote soon after to a lady in 

842 



HIS WELCOME HOME. 343 

Paris, " supposing I had only to say No, and there would be an end 
of it." 

In all Virginia there was scarcely such a thing, at that time, as 
a public conveyance. Friends, however, lent the party horses ; and 
they journeyed homeward in tbe delightfully slow, easy, social man- 
ner of the time, stopping at every friend's house on and near their 
road. They were ten days or more in getting as far as Kiclimond. 
The legislature was in session, many of Jefferson's old colleagues 
being present. They coiild not let him pass through the caj)ital of 
his native State without some mark of their regard. On the 7th 
of December, 1789, the House of Delegates appointed a committee 
of thirteen members, — sacred number! — with Patrick Henry for 
chairman, to congratulate him on his return, and to assure him of 
their esteem for " his character and public services." The com- 
mittee waited upon him, and communicated the resolution of the 
House. His reply was in the taste of the period : — 

"I receive with humble gratitude, gentlemen, the congratulations 
of the Honorable the House of Delegates on my return ; and I beg 
leave, through you, to present them my thanks and dutiful respects. 
Could any circumstance heighten my affection to my native coun- 
try,, it would be the indulgence with which they view my feeble 
efforts to serve it, and the, esteem with which they are pleased to 
honor me. I shall hope to merit a continuance of their goodness, 
by obeying the impulse of a zeal of which public good is the first 
object, and public esteem the highest reward. Permit me, gen- 
tlemen, for a moment, to separate from my general thanks the 
special ones 1 owe to you, the organs of so flattering a communica- 
tion." i- 

Resuming their journey, they arrived, early in December, at the 
mansion of Uncle Eppes in Chesterfield County, the happy home 
of Mary Jefferson's childhood. Here they halted for many days. 
It was at this place that Jeff'erson received the official announce- 
ment of his appointment as secretary of state. A gentleman from 
New York overtook him at Eppington, bearing his commission 
signed by the president : also a letter from the president, cordially 
inviting him to accept the place, yet giving him his choice to return 
to Paris if he preferred to do so. It was evident that General 



344 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

Washington expected liim to accept. Mr. Jefferson's reply was 
such as became the citizen of a republic. He told the president 
that he preferred to remain in the office he then held, the duties of 
which he knew and felt equal to, rather than undertake a place, the 
duties of which were more difiBcult and much more extensive. 
" But," he added, " it is not for an individual to choose his post. 
You are to marshal us as may be best for the public good." There- 
fore, if the president, after learning his decided preference to return 
to France, still thought it best to transfer him to New York, " my 
inclination must be no obstacle." 

They were six weeks in reaching home. Two days before Christ- 
mas, — a joyful time of year everywhere, but nowhere, perhaps, 
quite so hilarious as in the Virginia of that generation, — all was 
expectation at Monticello. The house had been made ready. The 
negroes, to whom a holiday had been given, all came in from the 
various farms of the estate, dressed in their cleanest attire, and 
the women wearing their brightest turbans, and gathered, early in the 
day, about the house. Their first thought was to meet the return- 
ing familj' at the foot of the mountain ; and thither they moved in 
a body, — men, women, and children, — long before there was any 
reason to expect them. As the tedious hours passed, the more 
eager of the crowd walked on ; and these being followed by the 
rest, there was a straggling line of them a mile or two in length. 
Late in the afternoon, the most advanced descried a carriage at 
Shadwell, drawn by four horses, with postilions, in the fashion of 
the time. The exulting shout was raised. All ran forward ; and 
soon the whole crowd huddled round the vehicle, pulling, pushing, 
crying, cheering, until it reached the steep ascent of the mountain, 
where the slackened pace gave them the opportunity they desired. 
In spite of the master's entreaties and commands, they took off" the 
horses, and drew the carriage at a run up the mountain, and round 
the lawn to the door of the house. 

It was no easy matter to alight. Mr. Jefferson swam in a tumul- 
tuous sea of black arms and faces, from the carriage to the steps of 
the portico. Some kissed his hands, others his feet; some cried, 
others laughed ; all tried at least to touch him. Not a word could 
be heard above the din. But when the young ladies appeared ; when 
Martha, whom they had last seen a child of eleven, stepped forth a 
woman grown, in all the glorious lustre of youth, beauty, and joy ; 



HIS WELCOME HOME. 345 

and when Mary followed, a sylph in form, face, and step, they all 
fell apart, and made a lane for them to pass, holding up their chil- 
dren to see them, and uttering many a cry of rapturous approval. 
The father and daughters entered the house at length; the carriage 
rolled away ; the negroes went off chattering to their quarters ; and 
there was quiet again at Monticello. " Such a scene," wrote Martha 
Jefferson long after, " I never witnessed in my life." As late as 
1851, INIr. Eandall heard a vivid description of it at IMonticello, from 
an aged negro who was one of the boys of the joyful crowd. 

The merry Christmas passed. One of the first visitors from 
beyond the immediate neighborhood was James Madison, who was 
about starting for New York to attend Congress. General Wash- 
ington, it seems, had requested him to call at Monticello, and ascer- 
tain more exactly the state of Mr. Jefferson's mind with regard to 
the appointment. " I was sorry," Madison wrote to the president, 
January 4, 1790, "to find him so little biassed in favor of the domes- 
tic service allotted him, but was glad that his difficulties seemed to 
result chiefly from what I take to be an erroneous view of the kind 
and quantity of business." To the foreign department alone he felt 
equal, but he dreaded the new and unknown duties which had been 
annexed to that. Upon receiving this information, the president 
wrote again to Jefferson. The new business, he thought, would not 
be arduous ; and, if it should prove so, doubtless Congress would apply 
a remedy. The office, in the president's opinion, was very impor- 
tant, on many accounts ; and he knew of no one who could better 
execute it. He added a remark sure to have great weight with Jef- 
ferson, as, indeed, it ought : " In order that you may be better pre- 
pared to make your ultimate decision on good grounds, I think it 
necessary to add one fact, which is this, that your late appointment 
has given very extensive and very great satisfaction to the public." 
Still the president would not urge acceptance. He merely said, 
with regard to his own feelings, " My original opinion and wish 
may be collected from my nomination." Jefferson yielded without 
further parley. "I no longer hesitate," he wrote February 11, "to 
undertake the office to which you are pleased to call me." So Mr. 
Short had to break up the establishment at Paris, and send home 
the accumulated treasures of five years' haunting of Paris bookstalls 
and curiosity-shops. 

The day after accepting office, a committee of his old constituents 



346 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

of Albemarle arrived at Monticello, and presented an address of 
congratulation and commendation. It was unusually cordial and 
interesting. They sketched his whole public career with approval ; 
and felicitated themselves upon the fact, that it was they who had 
introduced him to public life. Above all his other services, the}' 
extolled "the strong attachment he had always shown to tlie rights 
of mankind, and to those institutions that were best calculated to 
preserve them." Much as they should like to enjoy his services 
again, they assured him that they were too much attached to the com- 
mon interests of their country, and too sensible of his merit, not to 
unite with the general voice that called him " to continue in her 
councils." In his reply, he again seized the opportunity to recall 
attention to first principles. The favor of his neighbors, he said, 
was, indeed, " the door through which he had been ushered on the 
stage of public life ;" and, after becoming reference to that circum- 
stance, he added these words, which contain the chief article of his 
political creed : — 

"We have been fellow-laborers and fellow-sufferers ; and Heaven 
has rewarded us with a happy issue from our struggles. It rests now 
with ourselves alone to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of 
self-government, so long denied to mankind: to show by example 
the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs ; and 
that the will of the majority — the natural law of everj'^ society — 
is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this 
may sometimes err ; but its errors are honest, solitary'', and short- 
lived. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the 
general reason of the society. We are safe with that, even in its 
deviations, for it soon returns again to the right way." 

The lovers, meanwhile, were improving their time. February 23, 
1790, the wedding occurred at Monticello. The clergyman who 
performed the ceremony was Mr. Maury, son of Jefferson's school- 
master. Young liandolph was heir to large estates ; and the pair, 
after living a while at Monticello, settled on land in the neighbor- 
hood. For a single week Jefferson witnessed and shared the happi- 
ness of his children; and then, in obedience to General Washing- 
ton's urgent desire, he set out for New York. The president had 
already kept the office six months for him j business was accumu- 



HIS WELCOME HOIklE. 347 

lating; he miglit well be a little impatient to see bis secretary of 
state. 

What a journey Jefferson had of it in the wet and stormy INIarch 
of 1790 ! Twenty-one days of hard travel, including brief rests at 
Eichmond, Alexandria, Baltimore, and Philadelphia! Delightful 
as old-fashioned travel may have been to a home-returning plenipo- 
tentiary, leisure being abundant, and the season propitious, it was 
misery to a secretar}'- of state overdue, in chill and oozy March, at 
a point four hundred miles distant. He sent his carriage round to 
Alexandria in advance, intending to go in it the rest of the way. 
At that ancient and flourishing port, where he paused one day, he 
received an address from the mayor and citizens; from which we 
learn that his labors in behalf of commerce had become known to 
parties interested. The Alexandrians, besides approving his exer- 
tions in " the sacred cause of freedom," had a word of thanks for 
" the indulgences which his enlightened representations to the court 
of France had secured to their trade ; " adding these words : " You 
have freed commerce from its shackles, and destroyed the first essay 
made in this country towards establishing a monopoly." The last 
remark was aimed, probably, at British merchants and their resident 
agents, who still had a tight grip upon Virginia estates, and did not 
want any Virginia ships to go to Havre. Jefferson waived this com- 
pliment with his usual excess of modesty, but did not refrain from 
a sentence or two upon general politics : — 

" Convinced that the republican is the only form of government 
which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of man- 
kind, my prayers and efforts shall be cordially contributed to the 
support of that we have so happily established. ... It is, indeed, 
an animating thought, that, while we are securing the rights of our- 
selves and our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling 
nations, who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. 
Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, tri- 
umphantly through them ! " 

All this was cordial to the people of that day, who had scarcely 
heard, as yet, that there were Americans who felt otherwise. No 
one could say, in March, 1790, that it was the partisan who spoke 
such words. 



348 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

During the nigKt of liis stay at Alexandria, a late winter storm 
covered the ground with snow to the depth of eighteen inches. He 
therefore left liis carriage to be sent round by sea, and took a place 
in the stage, his horses being left, and ridden after him by his ser- 
vants. So bad were the roads, that the lumbering vehicle, as he 
wrote back to his son-in-law, "could never go more than three miles 
an hour, sometimes not more than two, and in the night but one." 
During the few hours of his stay at Philadelphia, he had his last 
interview with Dr. Franklin, who was then on the bed from which 
he was to be borne, a month after, to his coffin. Tlie old man, 
whose mental faculties seemed to remain undiminished to the last, 
listened with flushed face to Jefferson's narrative of all that had 
occurred lately in France. He asked eagerly what part his friends 
there had taken, what had been their course amid the torrent of 
events, and what their fate. Jefferson had volumes to impart to 
him, and Franklin was almost exhausted by the intensity of his 
interest in what he heard. 

Sunday, March 21, 1790, " after as laborious a journey as I ever 
went through," Jefferson reached New York. A paragraph of a 
line and a half in the principal newspaper of the town announced 
his arrival ; but, as he attacked immediately the accumulated busi- 
ness of his office, his name soon begins to appear at the end of pub- 
lic documents, below that of '■ G. Washington." The amount of 
work in prospect was a little alarming. Finding no suitable house 
vacant in " the Broadway," he hired a small one. No. 57 Maiden 
Lane, while he could look about him ; for it was his habit and inten- 
tion to keep house in comfortable style. The salary of his office 
then was three thousand five hundred dollars a year, five hundred 
more than the salaries of his colleagues in the cabinet. Hamilton 
lived in Pine Street, where so many lawyers still labor, but not live ; 
and Colonel Aaron Burr was plodding at the law in Nassau Street, 
near Wall, where he had a large garden and grapeiy. Jefferson 
appears to have startled mankind by continuing at first to wear his 
French clothes, even red breeches and red waistcoat, the fashion in 
Paris. 



^s* 



CHAPTER XL. 

ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 

With whatever reluctance aud dread Jefferson may have ac- 
cepted the office of secretary of state, his forebodings were realized. 
After five years' residence in Paris at the most interesting period of 
its history; after a kind of triumphal progress through Virginia, 
where delegations of grateful and admiring citizens had saluted him 
with addresses of congratulation ; after some peerless weeks at Mon- 
ticello, crowded with old friends and relatives gathered to attend his 
daughter's wedding, — he found himself, in the early spring of 1790, 
just when his gardens at home were fullest of allurement, closeted 
with four clerks (the whole force of his department), face to face 
with a . Monticello of despatches, documents, applications, many of 
which were bulky and important papers, requiring close attention 
and hard work. It was like going to school after a ^particularly 
joyous vacation, — inky grammar and damp dictionary, instead of 
gun and picnic ; keen contests with uncomplimentary equals and 
rivals, instead of the easily won applause of partial friends and 
affectionate sisters. He had enjoyed much and done much during 
the past few^ years : he was now to be tried and tested. The sum- 
mer of his growth was suspended ; the wintry blast was to blow 
uiwn him awhile, pruning and hardening him. A tree does not 
look so pretty during this season, but the timber ought to improve. 

He had a cordial welcome in New York. General Washington 
was relieved to find his cabinet complete after the new government 
had existed nearly a year, and glad to have near him a Virginian 
whom he knew, from of old, to be in singular accord with the 
American people. The loading citizens threw open their doors to 
him. Among members of (Congress, whom should he find but that 
genial comrade of his youth, John Page ? Oddly enough, one of 

349 



350 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the first parties he attended, in the very first week of his residence, 
was the wedding of that confidant of liis own early loves to a 
daughter of New York. Madison, too, was in Congress, with other 
allies and old colleagues. But it is plain, from his letters, that his 
heart was in Virginia; that he pined for his children, and took un- 
kindly to the yoke of his office. He told his daughters, that, after 
having had them with him so long to cheer him in the intervals of 
business, he felt acutely the separation from them ; but that his own 
happiness had become a secondary consideration with him, and he 
was only happy in their happiness. He was homesick during the 
whole period of his holding this office, except when he was at home. 

Even his health failed at first. He attacked his arrears of busi- 
ness with such vigor and persistence as to bring on a three weeks' 
headache, which for several days even kept him from his office. 
And while the gloom of this malady still hung over him, the infant 
government was menaced with a stroke that appalled the group of 
j^ersons nearest him, whose dearest hopes for themselves and for 
their country were bound up with it. The president, who had been 
drooping for some time, became alarmingly sick. Washington, too, 
found the desk a bad exchange from the saddle. It was his custom 
to read with the utmost care, pen in hand, all important despatches 
and papers, and to make abstracts of the most important. -During 
the year that had elapsed since his inauguration, he had been going 
through, iu the same thorough, attentive manner, the mass of papers 
which had been accumulating in the offices of government since the 
peace of 1783. Fidelity to a trust was the ruling instinct, the first 
necessity, in the nature of this most nearly perfect head of a com- 
monwealth that ever lived. For several days in May, 1790, the 
inner circle of official persons in New York were anxious about him. 
He grew worse and worse. At one time the inmates of his house 
lost all hope, for he seemed to be dying. He rallied, however, and 
began slowly to improve. " He continues mending to-day," Jeffer- 
son wrote to his daughter, "and from total despair we are now in 
good hopes of him." 

In a strange, unexpected way, Jefferson found liimself in ill-accord 
with the tone of society in New York. He had come from Paris 
more a republican than ever, all glowing witli the new liopes for 
mankind whirh the Revolution there had kindled. The patriots of 
France had drawn inspiration from America, and tried all their 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 351 

measures by American standards. " Our proceedings," Jefferson 
wrote to Madison from Paris, in August, 1789, " have been viewed 
as a model for them on every occasion ; and though, in the heat of 
debate, men are generally disposed to contradict every authority 
urged by their opponents, ours has been treated like that of the 
Bible, open to explanation, but not to question." He was now iu 
that America whose conquest of freedom and peaceful establishment 
of a republican government intelligent men in other lands liad 
owned among the noblest achievements of civilization. Tlie faith- 
ful believer was now at Mecca. But he did not find the magnates 
of the temple so enthusiastic for the Prophet and the Koran as 
more distant worshippers. 

While France for sixty years — ever since the publication of Vol- 
taire's "English Letters," in 1730 — had been growing to a sense 
of the evils of excessive power in the government, America for ten 
years had had painful experience of the evils of an insufficient 
central authority. 

A favorite toast in the Revolutionary Army, as General Knox 
records, was tliis, " A Hoop to the Barrel." Some officers pre- 
ferred a plainer form of words, and gave the same sentiment thus, 
"Cement to the Union." The army, he says, abhorred the idea of 
being "thirteen armies." We can all imagine how much feelings 
of this nature would be increased when the troops co-operated with 
French soldiers, who served a single power, carried one flag, obeyed 
one general, received the same pay at regularly recurring periods, in 
a kind of money that did not waste and spend itself, even when it 
lay vintonched in the pocket, — money to-day, paper to-morrow. 
We cannot wonder that officers should have longed for an efficient 
power at the centre, when we hear General Washington averring 
that to the want of it he attributed "more than half" of his own 
perplexities, and " almost the whole of the difficulties and distress 
of the army." Civilians came, at length, to share in this feeling, 
and no man more than Jefferson. When in Paris, in 178G, he was 
choking down the humiliation of bribing the Algerines to peace, 
instead of blowing the pirates out of water with honest guns under 
his country's flag, he desired nothing so much as that Congress 
should seize the happy occasion to found a navy. " It will be said," 
he wrote to Monroe, " there is no money in the treasury. There 
never will be money in the treasury till the Confederacy shows its 



352 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

teeth. The States must see the rod : perhaps it must be felt by one 
of tliem. I am persuaded all of them would rejoice to see every 
one obliged to furnish its contributions," 

Every thing had been pulling this way in America for ten years 
■when Jefferson reached New York. He came from Paris when it 
was negatively charged with electricity, to New York positively 
charged. The whole soul of France was intent upon limiting the 
central power, but America's dearest wish had long been to create 
one. 

There is a fashion in thinking, as well as in watch-chains and 
dog-carts. In the new, untried republic, which had had no expe- 
rience of tyranny except to combat and defeat it, various influences 
had been drawing the minds of the educated class away from repub- 
lican ideas. It was the mode to extol strong and imposing govern- 
ments, to regret that the people were so attached to the town- 
meeting methods of conducting public busineso, and to anticipate 
the day when America would be ripe for a government '' not essen- 
tially different from that which they had recently discarded." No- 
where was this tone so prevalent as in New York, — the chief seat of 
the royal authority for seven years of the war; the refuge of Tories ; 
the abode, after the peace, of that ardent, positive, captivating spirit, 
Alexander Hamilton. 

How difficult to extract the real Hamilton from the wilderness of 
contradictory words in which he is lost ! Every thing we haye about 
him partakes of the violence of his time. If we question his oppo- 
nents, Jefferson informs us that Hamilton was '' the evil genius of 
America ; " and George Mason declares that he did the country 
more harm than " Great Britain with all her fleets and armies." If 
we consult his partisans, we are assured, that, after having created 
the government, he, and he alone, kept it in prosperous motion for 
twelve years. Every one has in his memory some fag-end of Daniel 
Webster's magnificent sentence, in which he represents Hamilton 
as touching the corpse of the Public Credit, and causing it to spring 
to its feet. And have we not a lumbering pamphlet, in seven 
volumes octavo, designed to show that George Washington was 
Punch, and Alexander Hamilton the man behind the green curtain, 
pulling the wires and making him talk ? We have. It weighs many 
pounds avoirdupois. But we must rule out extreme and frenzied 
utterances, and endeavor to estimate this gifted and interesting 



ALEXANDER HA.MILTON". 353 

man as though he had had no worshippers, no rivals, and no 
sous. 

It is not so very easy to see why he had any public career at all. 
When we have turned over tlie ton of printed matter to which he 
gave rise, and looked at all his busts and portraits, we are still at 
some loss to undei'stand the victorious dash he made at America. A 
little fellow of about fiv^e feet seven, a stranger in a strange land, 
without an influential friend on earth, tlie child of a broken-down 
merchant in the West Indies, subsisting in New Jersey upon 
invoices of West India produce, we find him, from the start, having 
the best of every thing, distinguished at school, at college, in the 
arm^y, taking an influential part in every striking scene of the war, 
and every crisis after the peace, — a public man, as it were, by 
nature. Nor was it a dash only. He held his own ; and, rapid as 
his rise was, it was always the high place that sought him, never he 
the high place; unless, indeed, when he asked General Washington 
the favor of letting him head an attack on the enemy's works. 
Nor was it merely place and distinction that he won. The daughter 
of one of America's most noted and wealthy families became the 
proud and happy wife of this stranger when he was a lieutenant- 
colonel of twenty-three, without a dollar or an acre to fall back upon 
at the peace. 

We do not get at the secret of all this from print or picture ; so 
difficult is it to put upon paper or canvas that which gives a man 
ascendency oyev othe-rs. It is hard to define the Spirit of Command. 
Kent recognized it in Lear when he met the fiery old king in the 
wilderness, and told him he had that in his mien and bearing which 
he would fain call master. I once asked a Tennesseean what kind 
of man General Jackson was. "He was this kind of man," said 
he : " if Andrew Jackson had joined a party of strangers travelling 
in the woods, and, half an hour after, they should be attacked by 
Indians, he would instantly take command, and all the rest would 
obey him." Nothing that has ever been put upon paper about 
Jackson so explains him as this chance saying of an unlettered- 
man. 

Of this commanding, self-su£6cient spirit Hamilton had an ample 
share. His confidence in himself is among the curiosities of char- 
acter ; it was absolute and entire : and, hence, neither events nor 
men could teach him ; and he died cherishing the delusions of his 
23 



354 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 

youth. If to this remaric his life furnishes one exception, it was 
when as a lad of sixteen he allowed himself to he converted from a 
supporter of the king to a defender of the colonies. But, it seems, 
even this conversion was only partial : for/ when it came to a ques- 
tion of severance from the king, he wrote a pamphlet against 
Paine's " Common Sense." He appears to have had nothing that 
could he called youth. In the earliest of his efiusions, whatever we 
may think of the sentiments, we perceive that the writer had no 
sense whatever of the deference due from youth to maturitj'. Noth- 
ing is more evident in his aide-de-camp letters than that he 
condescended to serve General Washington. He was hut twenty- 
four when he wrote, after refusing to resume his place in the 
general's family, that he had remained in it as long as he had, not 
from regard to General Washington, nor hecause he thought it an 
honor or a privilege to assist him, but hecause the popularity of the 
general was essential to the safety of America, and he "thought it 
necessary he should be supported." It w^as also his opinion that 
the breach between them ought to be concealed, since it would have 
"an ill-effect" if it were known. In the records of youthful arro- 
gance, there are few instances so amusing as this. 

But, then, those who knew him best appear to have accepted him 
at his own valuation. Some unv.'oi'thy opponents have dishonored 
themselves by sneering at his poverty and at the alleged insignifi- 
cance of his family in the West Indies ; but he brought with him 
from St. Croix a better title of nobility than any herald could have 
given him, — the admiring love of his friends there, who hailed his 
early honors in the United States with enthusiasm. His brother 
aids in General Washington's busy family loved him most warmly. 
In his early letters we catch gleams of the good fellow amid the 
formalities of the general-in-chief's official scribe. "Mind your 
eye to-night, my boy," he writes to a young friend on picket; and 
Meade, his colleague, writes to him as a lover to a mistress. "If 
you have not already writ to me," says Meade, "let me entreat you, 
when you go about it, to fill a sheet in close hand." At the same 
time, when governors, generals, members of Congress, and presi- 
dents of Convention wrote to him, they addressed him as a man of 
their own weight and standing, as a personage and an equal. The 
general-in-chief, too, overvalued the accomplishments he did not 
himself possess, — the fluent tongue, the ready pen, dexterity at 
figures. 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON-. 355 

Hamilton was singularly incapable of Americanization. Besides 
having arrived here a few j'^ears too late, his mind was invincibly 
averse to what we may call the town-meeting spirit, — the true 
public spirit, generated by the habit of acting in a body for the 
good of the whole, putting questions to the vote, and accepting the 
will of the majority as law. His instincts were soldierly. How he 
delighted in all military things! How he loved the recollection of 
his seven years' service in the array! In later years, though under 
a political necessity to detest Bonaparte, he found it impossible to 
do so with any heartiness, so bewitched was he with the mere skill 
with which that marauder of genius devastated the heritage of the 
people of Europe. He delighted to read of battles. It pleased him 
to have a tent upon his lawn, because it reminded him of the days 
when he and Lafayette and Meade and the young French officers 
were merry together ; and he always retained in his gait something 
that betrayed the early drill. But it is questionable if he could 
ever hjive been greatly successful as a general, because, unlike 
Bonaparte, he thought officers were every thing, and soldiers noth- 
ing. When he was a bronzed veteran of twenty-two, he wrote a 
letter of ludicrous gravity to the president of Congress, urging the 
enrolment of negro slaves ; in which he says that their stupidity 
and ignorance would be an advantage. It was a maxim, he 
observed, with some great military judges, — the king of Prussia 
being one, — that, " with sensible officers, soldiers can hardly be too 
stupid." flence "it was thought" that the Russians wotild be the 
best soldiers in the world if they were commanded by officers of a 
more advanced countrj'. The conclusion reached by this great 
military authority was this : " Let officers be men of sense and sen- 
timent ; and the nearer the soldiers approach to machines, perhaps 
the better." 

As the utterance of a very young military dandy, airing his lav- 
ender kids in St. James's Park after an early breakfast at one, p.m., 
this would be merely funny : we should smile, and hope he would 
rhow to better advantage when the time came for action. And, 
indeed, Hamilton was a brave, vigilant, energetic officer, on fire to 
distinguish himself by being foremost where the danger was great- 
est. But this contempt for the undistinguished part of mankind 
(i.e. for mankind) he never outgrew. The ruling maxim of his 
public life, the source of its weakness, its errors, and its failure, was 
this, " Men in general are vicious." 



356 . LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOJf. 

This lamentable misreading of human nature^ so worthy of a 
Fouche or a Tallej'rand, he repeats in manj^ forms, alwaj^s assuming 
it to be a self-evident truth. It was certainly an unfortunate basis 
for a statesman who was to be the servant of a system founded on a 
conviction that men in general are well disposed. He could not be 
an American. Richlj'' endowed as he was, he could not rise to that 
height. He knew it himself at last; for twent}^ j^ears later, when 
he had outlived his success, and lost the control even of his own wing 
of the Federalists, we hear him saying, with his usual unconscious 
arrogance, "Every day proves to me, more and more, that this 
American world was not made for me." It ce^rtainly was not, nor 
was he made for this American world. It never, we may be sure, 
once crossed his mind, during his whole life, that possibly this 
American world might be right, and Colonel Hamilton wrong. 

Every thing that happens to these self-suiBcient persons seems to 
confirm them in their errors and strengthen their strong propensi- 
ties. This American world, which Hamilton thought so mueh 
beneath him, had been too easy a conquest : he would have re- 
spected it more, perhaps, if it had given him a few hard knocks at 
an age when hard knocks are salutary. But when he began to 
write his first essays in the newspapers, literary abilitj^ was so rare 
in the world, — rarest of all in these colonies, — that his friends 
were agape with wonder. Every one flattered him. Then he early 
exhibited another imposing talent, that of oratory. He was ha- 
ranguing meetings in New York when he was the merest boy both 
in years and appearance, and acquitting himself to admiration. He 
was but nineteen, and 3'oung-looking even for that age, when he 
thundered across Jersey, captain of a company of artillerj^, in Gen- 
eral Washington's retreating army. Soon after, in. his character of 
aide-cle-cavip, he was truly an important person, a powder, as any 
efficient aid must ever be to a busy commander, as any competent 
secretary must ever be to the greatest minister. If he overesti- 
mated his importance, it was but natural and most jjardonable. 
Few young fellows of twenty, w^ho write despatches or editorials for 
a chief, can believe that the chief may be the true author of im- 
portant despatches or thundering leaders which, perhaps, he never 
so much as looks over. The chief has created the situation which 
the writer but expresses. A secretary, while using his own baud, 
often employs his chief's mind. 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 357 

When tlie young French officers came over, and head-quarters 
were gay with young nobles, all enthusiasm for this novel service in 
a new world, Colonel Hamilton was a brilliant personage indeed, — 
so young, so handsome, so high in the confidence of the general 
and the army, and such a master of the French language ! He 
must, I think, have spoken French in his boyhood, to have written 
it so well at twenty-three as we see he did. Who was now so much 
in request as our cher Hamilton? 

But, if he caught his loose military morals from the Gauls, it was 
from the British that this Briton learned his politics. Before the 
war was over, he tells us, he " was struck with disgust " at the rise 
of a party actuated by *' an undue complaisance " to France, — a 
power which, in helping us, had only been pursuing, he thought, 
her own interest. " I resolved at once," he continues, " to resist 
this bias in our affairs." He was British, as was natural. He had 
a British mind and a British heart. While in the immediate pres- 
ence of the fact, that the English governmental system had split 
asunder the British Empire, he cherished the conviction that it 
was th^ best system possible. It was the hereditary Dunderhead 
with whom Great Britain was saddled, who began, continued, and 
ended, the business of severing America from the empire; and yet 
the very corruption of parliament, which had enabled an obstinate 
and unteachable king to carry his measures, Hamilton extolled as 
essential to its perfection. The grand aim of his public life was 
to make the government of the United States as little unlike that 
of Great Britain as the people would bear it. Nor did he reach 
these convictions by any process of reasoning. He was a Briton; 
and it was then part of a Briton's birthright to enjoy a complete 
assurance of his country's vast superiority to all others in all things. 
I honor him for the disinterested spirit in which he pursued his 
system, and the splendid contempt of all considerations of policy 
with which he avowed opinions the most unpopular. In spite of 
his errors and his faults, this alone would give him some title to our 
regard. 

With all his other qualities, he had one which would have carried 
him to great heights in a more congenial scene. He had a wonderful 
power of sustilined exertion. His mind was energetic and pertina- 
cious. He thought little of sitting over a paper till the dawn 
dimmed his candles. His favorite ideas and schemes were never 



358 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

inert within him : he dinned them into every ear; and his inces- 
sant and interminable discourses upon the charms of monarchy- 
rendered him, at last, a bore to his best friends. 

He began at an early period of the war to take a laborious part 
in political discussion. AVhile the army lay at Morristown in 1779, 
having less to do than usual at head-quarters, and having arrived 
at the mature age of twenty-three, he wrote to Kobert Morris an 
anonymous letter, that must have filled a dozen sheets of large 
paper, upon the troubled finances of the country, recommending 
the establishment of a Bank of the United States. The scheme 
was wrought out in great detail, with infinite -labor and uncommon 
ability for so young a financier. The scheme was founded upon 
Law's idea of utilizing the depreciated paper with which Louis 
XIX's profusion had deluged France. By receiving hundreds of 
millions of this paper at its market value, in payment for shares 
in his various enterprises. Law soon raised the price of paper above 
that of gold, and thus afforded the strange spectacle of people 
selling their family plate in order to buy a dead king's promises to 
pay. Hamilton, of course, intended to stop short of Law's fatal 
excesses. He was as honorable a person, in all matters pecuniary, 
as ever drew the breath of life ; and, consequently, Ms bank was to 
have a sound basis of two millions of pounds sterling of borrowed 
money : to which should be added a subscription of two hundred 
millions of dollars in the depreciated paper of Congress. At once, 
he thought, the paper would rise in value, and become an instru- 
ment of good. The existence of the bank, he thought, " would 
make it the ivimediate interest of the moneyed men to co-operate 
with the government in its support." This was the key to his 
financial system ; for he never advanced beyond the ideas of this 
production. It was ever his conviction, that a government could 
not stand which it was not the interest of capitalists to uphold ; and 
by capitalists he meant the class who control money, who live in 
cities, and can speculate in paper. He meant Wall Steeet ; though, 
as yet, the actual street of that name was only a pleasant lane of 
modest, Dutch-looking residences. 

This portentous epistle was accompanied with notes, in one of 
which the youthful sage favors an honorable Congress with a few 
hints. " Congress," he observes, with the modesty so becoming his 
years, " have too long neglected to organize a good scheme of 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 359 

administration, and throw public business into proper executive 
departments. For commerce, I prefer a board ; but, for most other 
things, single men. We want a minister of war, a minister of 
foreign affairs, a minister of finance, and a minister of marine ; " 
and having these, he thought, " we should blend the advantages 
of a monarchy and a republic in a happy and a beneficial union." 

What Eobert Morris thought of this production no one has told 
us. The author of it was evidently in earnest. He did not write 
the essay to amuse his leisure, nor merely to display his talents : 
he meant batik. He clearly saw the institution he recommended, 
believed in its feasibility, and, I am sure, felt himself competent to 
assist in establishing it, though he intended Mr. Morris to take 
the leading part. He concluded his long letter by saying that he 
had reasons which made him unwilling to be known ; but a letter 
addressed to James Montague, Esq., lodged in the post-office at Mor- 
ristown, would reach him ; and even an interview might be had 
with the author, should it be thought material. 

From this time the ingenious, intense, Scotch intellect of Alex- 
ander Hamilton was a power in the United States. Before the 
war was quite over he was in Congress ; and one of the members 
said to him, "If you were, but ten years older and twenty thousand 
pounds richer. Congress would give you the highest place they have 
to bestow." In New York, j'oung as he was, without fortune, just 
admitted to the bar, we find him alwaj's discussing the great topics ; 
always the peer of the most important men; always exerting his 
influence for one overruling object, — the founding of a "strong," 
a "high-toned" government; which should attract to it the trinity 
he believed in, — "charactei-, talents, and property, — and raise the 
thirteen States to national rank. In the State of New York he 
became, not the most powerful, but by far the most shining, con- 
spicuous, active personage. 

Behold him, at length, in the Convention of 1787; which met 
at Philadelphia to make a constitution, — Washington its president, 
Franklin a member. It was this young lawyer, thirty years of 
age, who brought with him a plan of government, so completely 
wrought out, that, Madison says, it could have gone into operation 
at once, without alteration or addition. He had thought of every 
thing, and provided for every thing. There it was, in Hamilton's 
pocket, a goverjs'Ment, complete to the last detail. In making it, 



860 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

too, lie had exercised self-control : he had put far away from him 
his own dearest preferences ; he had fixed his thoughts upon the 
people of the United States, allowed for their prejudices, their 
ignorance of Greek and Roman history, their infatuation in sup- 
posing they knew what was good for them. In a most able, ingen- 
ious, candid speech of five or six hours' duration, he told the 
Convention what he knew about government, and prepared the way 
for the reading of his plan. He said he did not offer it as the best 
conceivable, but only tlie best attainable. The British Constitu- 
tion, he said, was " the best form." It was only a king who was, 
necessarily, " above corruption," who " must always intend, in 
respect to foreign nations, the true interest and glory of the peo- 
ple." Republicanism was a dream, — an amiable dream it was true, 
but still a dream. No matter : the people would have their govern- 
ment republican ; and therefore, as long as there was any cliance 
of its success, he would do his very utmost to afford it a chance. 
This he proposed to do by making the American republic as much 
like the British monarchy as possible. 

His plan was such as might have been expected from a person so 
ingenious, so self-sufficient, so inexperienced, and so young. Noth- 
ing more unsuitable or more impracticable can be imagined than 
this government evolved from the depths of Hamilton's conscious- 
ness ; for, even if the principles upon which it was founded had been 
admissible, it was far too complicated a machine for tlie wear and tear 
of use. Most of Hamilton's measures had the great fault of being 
too complex and refined. His enemies, indeed, accused him of pur- 
posely mystifying the people ; but, in truth, he had so mathematical 
an intellect, that a statement might be as clear as the light to him, 
W'hich was a mere conundrum to people in general. His scheme of 
government included, first of all, a popular assembly, or House of 
Commons, to consist of not less than a hundred members, elected by 
universal suffrage, which should have the control of the public purse, 
and the exclusive power to impeach. So far, so good. But assum- 
ing that men in general are ill-disposed, and stand ready to embrace 
the first opportunity of voting themselves a farm, his chief care was 
to keep this body in check ! That was a point respecting which he 
was deeply solicitous. Here was a democratic assembly, to be 
checked by an elected senate, and both of them by an elected chief 
magistrate. His senate, accordingly, which was to consist of not 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 361 

less than forty members, was to be a permanent body, elected by 
men of property. The senators, chosen by electoffs who had an 
estate in land for life, or for an unexpired term of fourteen years, 
were to hold their seats until removed by death or impeacbraent. 
It was the senate that was to declare war, ratify treaties, and con- 
trol appointments. 

The president of the republic was to be a tremendous personage 
indeed, more powerful far than any monarch of a country enjoying 
any semblance of liberty. No man could have any part even in 
electing him, who had not an inherited estate wholly his own, or for 
three lives, or " a clear personal estate of the value of a thousand 
Spanish dollars." Nor were these favored mortals to vote directly 
for the president : they were only to elect electors ; and these elect- 
ors were to vote for the president, each maij handing in a sealed 
ballot. That done, the electors of each State were to elect two 
"second electors," who were to carry the sealed ballots to some 
designated place, where, in the presence of the chief justice, they 
were to open the ballots, and declare that man president who had 
a majority of the whole number. In case no one had a ma-jority, 
then these second electors were to try their hand at electing, though 
they could only vote for the three candidates who had received the 
highest number of votes. If the second electors could not give a 
clear majority for any candidate, then the man who had received 
the highest number of votes of the first electors was to be declared 
elected. 

Happily, when once a president had been evolved by this ingen- 
ious complication, the country could hope to enjoy a long period of 
rest ; for he was to hold his office for life, unless removed by im- 
peachrnent. Besides exercising all the authority which our present 
Constitution confers on the president, Hamilton's president was to 
have the power to appoint the governors of States, and to convene 
and prorogue Congress. The President of the Senate was to be the 
Vice-President of the United States; and the Supreme Court was 
to be about such a tribunal as we see it now. 

When Dr. Channing was the ruling influence of Boston, forty 
years ago, the orthodox clergy used to describe his system of the- 
ology as " Calvinism with the bones taken out." The Convention 
of 1787 listened to Hamilton with attentive admiration, and then 
performed upon his plan of government an operation similar to that 



362 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

wliicli Dr. Clianning was supposed to have done upon the ancient 
creed of New England. Nothing which he regarded as hone was 
left in it. The Constitution of 1787, though he admitted it to be an 
improvement upon the Confederation, he thought a " shilly-shally 
thing," which might tide the country over the crisis, and begin the 
construction of a nation, but could not endure. What he chiefly 
hoped from it was this, That it would sicken the people of republic- 
anism, and reconcile it to the acceptance of his panacea of King, 
Lords, and Commons. For every reason, however, he deemed it 
necessary to give the new Constitution a trial; and, accordingly, it 
was Hamilton, the man who believed in it least, that did most to 
recommend it to the people. Gliding down the tranquil Hudson, 
in October, 1787, in one of the commodious packet-sloops of the 
time, he wrote in the cabin the first number of the series of news- 
l^aper essays now called "The Federalist." Absorbed as he then 
was in his young family and his profession, he found time, in the 
course of the winter, to write sixty-five of the eighty-five pieces of 
which the series consists; writing several of them, it appears, amid 
the bustle of his law-of&ce, with the priurter's boy waiting for the 
copy. 

These essays by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Jefferson read in 
Paris with great satisfaction. He had lamented the absence,' in the 
new Constitution, of a formal bill of rights, which should secure 
"the freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from stand- 
ing armies, trial by jury, and a constant haheas corjms act ; " and 
he regarded a few of its provisions with some apprehension. The 
re-eligibility of the president, he thought, would result in the presi- 
dent usually holding the office as long as he lived ; the tenden-cy to 
re-elect being so powerful. He would have preferred a single term 
of seven years, which was often proposed, and once carried in the 
Convention. But the Federalist, he owns, " rectified him on several 
points," dissipated his apprehensions, and rendered him more than 
willing to accept the Constitution, and trust to the future for the 
needful amendments. 

Thus we find persons of opposite political sympathies heartily 
commending a constitution which neither of them whollj' approved : 
Hamilton, because it was, as he hoped, a step toward the only kind 
of government he believed in, — a limited monarchy ; Jefierson, 
because he thought it would issue in a plain, republican government, 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 363 

simple, inexpensive, just sufficient to enable tlie thirteen States to 
deal with foreign nations as one power, and secure the prompt pay- 
ment of the Revolutionary debt. When Hamilton commended the 
Constitution, he had in his mind his ^'favorite morsels," those fea- 
tures which gave the government some resemblanc^to a monarchy, 
which made it more imposing, and less dependent upon the people, 
than the Confederation which it displaced. Coming events, he felt 
sure, would quickly convince all thinking men that a democratic as- 
sembly could not be effectually '* checked " by a democratic senate, 
nor either of them by a democratic chief magistrate ; and then the 
whole of the character, talents, and property of America would 
demand the stiffening of the loose contrivance, by the insertion of the 
rivet, bolt, and screw, of an hereditary king and house of lords. 
Jefferson, on the other hand, looked upon the new government as an 
engine already more potent than the case required; cumbered with 
several superfluous appendages, easily capable of becoming oppress- 
ive ; but he trusted to time and the republican habits of the people 
to lop its redundancies, and keep its dangerous possibilities in check. 
What Jefterson loved in the Constitution, Hamilton despised ; and 
the changes in it which Hamilton hoped for, Jefferson dreaded. 



CHAPTER XLI. 

TONE OP KEW-YOBK SOCIETY IN 1790. 

In the city of New York in 1790, when it contained a population 
of about thirty-five thousand people, " society " consisted of so few 
families, that, when one of them gave a grand party, the whole body 
of society would be present. In this small circle Hamilton was 
incomparably the most shining and captivating individual, and he 
found it well disposed toward his ideas. What is society ? It prop- 
erly consists of the victorious class, the leading persons in each of 
the honorable pursuits : the great mechanics, merchants, lawyers, 
doctors, preachers, teachers, actors, artists, authors, capitalists, far- 
mers, engineers ; the men and women who have conquered a safe 
and pleasant place for themselves in the world by serving the com- 
munity with signal skill and effect. These are the aristocrats to 
whom we all render a proud and willing homage. We are even 
disposed to honor them too much, and undervalue the prodigious mul- 
titude of those who are equally worthy perhaps, though less gifted or 
less fortunate. But, in Hamilton's day, society chiefly consisted of 
families who had inherited estates, — people descended from victors. 
It is human in a conqueror to wish to throw around his conquest 
every possible safeguard. It is natural to a man who possesses a 
fine estate to lend a favoring mind to ideas, laws, usages, which tend 
to exempt that estate from the usual risks of waste and accident, 
and to reserve for the holders of inherited property the most coveted 
honors of the state. In New York, therefore, the young and elo- 
quent propagandist carried all before him, and assisted to prepare 
for his coming colleague a painful surprise. 

" I had left France," Mr. Jefferson wrote long after, " in the first 
year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for 
reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not 

364 



TONE OF NEW-YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 865 

be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by dai]y exer- 
cise. The president received me cordially, and my colleagues and 
the circle of principal citizens appai'ently with welcome. The cour- 
tesies of dinner-parties given me, as a stranger newlj'' arrived among 
them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot 
describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conver- 
sations filled me. Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of 
kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite senti- 
ment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite ; and I 
found myself, for the most part, the only advocate on the republican 
side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be 
some member of that party from the legislative houses." 

No one can glance over the memorials of the time without meet- 
ing on every side confirmation of this passage. The Hamiltonians, 
we perceive, were having it all their Own way in New Yorlc ; their 
immediate object being to surround the president with imposing 
ceremonial and court-like etiquette. Hamilton, strangely ignorant 
of human nature and of the people he aspired to serve, was infat- 
uated with the idea of gradually reconciling them to the ludicrous 
pomp of a European court. When General Washington asked his 
opinion as to the etiquette of the president's house, he replied, that, 
though the notions of equality were yet too general and too strong 
to admit of " a proper distance " being maintained by the chief 
magistrate, still he must go as far in that direction as the people 
would endure, even to the point of incurring the risk of partial and 
momentary dissatisfaction. He recommended the adoption of the 
usual etiquette of the courts of Europe ; except, that to " remove the 
idea of too immense an inequality," which,' he feared, would excite 
dissatisfaction and cabal, the president itfight invite a few high 
officials to dinner now and then; though, on such occasions, "the 
president should never remain long at the table ; " that is, as I sup- 
pose, not sit and booze after the ladies had retired. The president 
was to be so august and inaccessible a personage, that a member of 
the House of Representatives sh6uld have no right to an interview 
with him, even on public business, nor any foreigner of lower rank 
than ambassador. Senators, Hamilton thought, should be entitled 
to an interview, as the peers of France and England might demand 
to speak to their sovereign face to face ; and, besides, the people 
would be glad to know there was one body of men whose right to 



366 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

approach the president would he " a safeguard against secret comhi- 
nations to deceive liim." 

All the writings of the time that most readily catch the eye are 
in this tone. The vice-president, John Adams, seized every occa- 
sion to dwell upon the necessity of decorating the head of the state 
with the most gorgeous properties. This son of New England, who 
had had a life-time's experience of the unquestioning ohedience paid 
to the plainest citizen clad in the imperial purple of fair election or 
legal appointment, gave it as his opinion, that " neither dignity nor 
authority can be supported in human minds, collected into nations 
or any great numbers, without a splendor and majesty in some 
degree proportioned to them." He opposed the practice of styling 
the president His Excellency, for precisely the reason which made 
it a rule of the old French court to give every one some title of 
honor excepting alone the "king. To style the president His 
Excellency, Mr. Adams thought, was to " put liim on a level with 
a governor of Bermuda, or one of his own ambassadors, or a gover- 
nor of any one of our States." 

One would think, from reading the. letters and newspapers of 1789 
and 1790, that pickpockets and cut-throats could be driven, awe- 
struck, from their evil courses, by the magnificence of the presi- 
dent's house and the splendor of his chariot. Jefferson reached 
New York on Sunday, Marcli 21, 1790. In all probability, some 
one was polite enough to hand him the newspaper of the day before, 
the Gazette of the United States, the organ of the administration, full 
charged with the Hamiltonian spirit. If so, he may have espied this 
little essay, — milk for babes, not yet fit for stronger food, — which 
harmonized perfectly with the prevalent way of thinking : — 

" There must be some adventitious properties infused into the 
government to give it energy and spirit, or the selfish, turbulent 
passions of men can never be controlled. This has occasioned that 
artificial splendor and dignity that are to be found in the courts of 
so many nations. Some admiration and respect must be excited 
towards public officers, by their holding a real or supposed superior- 
ity over the mass of the people. The sanctions and penalties of law 
are likewise requisite to aid in restraining individuals from tram- 
pling upon and demolishing the government. It is confessed, that, in 
some situations a small degree of parade and solemnity, co-operating 



TONE OF NEW- YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 369 

" Wlien the Convention to form a Constitution was sitting in 
Philadelphia in 1787, of which General Washington was president, 
he had stated evenings to receive the calls of his friends. At an 
interview between Hamilton, the Morrises, and others, the former 
remarked that Washington was reserved and aristocratic even to 
his intimate friends, and allowed no one to be familiar with him. 
Gouverneur Morris said that was a mere fancy, and he could be as 
familiar with AVashington as with any of his other friends. Hamil- 
ton replied, " If you will, at the next reception evening, gently slap 
him on the shoulder, and say, ' My dear General, how happy I am 
to see j^ou look so well ! ' a supper and wine shall be provided for 
you and a dozen of your friends." The challenge was accepted. 
On the evening appointed, a large number attended ; and at an early 
hour Gouverneur Morris entered, bowed, shook hands, laid his left 
hand on Washington's shoulder, and said, " My dear General, I 
am very happy to see you look so well! " Washington withdrew his 
hand, stepped suddenly back, fixed his eye on Morris for several 
minutes with an angry frown, until the latter retreated abashed, and 
sought refuge in the crowd. The company looked on in silence. 
At the supper, which was provided by Hamilton, Morris said, " I 
have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce 
me to repeat it." 

It was not difficult to bring a gentleman of this reserved cast of 
character, who shrank from familiarities, to consent to being hedged 
about with etiquette. And there really seemed to prevail a mania 
to extol, exalt, and royalize the president. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson 
calls it, somewhere, "a frenzy." If the president attended a ball, 
the managers mu^t needs cause a platform to be erected at one end 
of the ball-room, several steps high, with a sofa upon it, and conduct 
thither the president and his " consort." An attempt was made to 
have the president's head engraved upon the coinage about to be 
issued by the new government. The levees were arranged and con- 
ducted exactly as at the palace of St. James ; and, when the president 
rode abroad on any official errand, he used what was called the state 
carriage, — a cream-colored chariot drawn by six horses, and 
attended by white servants, in liveries of white cloth trimmed with 
scarlet. 

All of which, we can now see, proves the innocence of the Hamil- 
24 



370 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

tonians of any design to spring a king upon the country ; for surely, 
people of their ability, who had formed a scheme to subvert republi- 
can government, would have most carefully avoided such a plain 
showing of their hand. They would at once have courted and 
deceived the multitude of republicans by casting aside the worn-out 
trumpery of kings, and weaving round the president the magic spell 
of utter simplicity. 

This was Bonaparte's method. We find him, first, an extreme 
republican, using all the forms of that sect with rigor long after he 
was the ruling mind of France ; next, an austere first consul, still 
dating his letters in the manner decreed by the republic, and calling 
his officers citizen-general ; last, when his genius had dazzled and 
overwhelmed his intellect, and he was expanding to his ruin, he 
stooped to the imperial crown, and condescended to inquire how 
things had been done' in the court of that gorgeous delusion, Louis 
XIV. 

Nothing could be more artless and open than the manner in which 
our imposing-government men sought to commend their opinions to 
the public. Colonel Hamilton, indeed, censured the vice-president 
for going too far and too fast in that direction ; disturbing people's 
minds prematurely, and not giving the new government that "fair 
chance " he was determined it should have. It was in this spring 
of 1790, when Jefferson and his four clerks were working their way 
down through the accumulated business of the state department, 
that Mr. Adams broke out in the Gazette with his weekly "Dis- 
courses on Davila," a chaos of passages from, and comments upon, a 
History of the Civil Wars of France by the Italian Davila, inter- 
spersed with long extracts from Pope, Young, Adam Smith, and any 
other author whom Mr. Adams might happen to think of in the fury 
of composition. The great object of the series was to show that 
there is a necessity, fixed in the constitution of the human mind, for 
such orders in the state as kings and nobles. The basis of Mr. 
Adams's political system, which he drew from his OAvn heart, was 
this : Man's controlling motive is the passion for distinction. If 
any one should doubt this, he advises that benighted person to go 
and attentively observe the journeymen and apprentices in the first 
workshop, or the oarsmen in a cockboat, the members of a family, a 
neighborhood, the inhabitants of a house, the crew of a ship, a school, 
a college, a city, a village, the bar, the church, the exchange, a camp, 



TONE OF NEW-YOEK SOCIETY IN 1790. 371 

a court, wherever, indeed, men, women, or children are to be found, 
whether old or j'oung, rich or poor, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, 
and he will find every individual " strongly actuated by a desire 
to be seen, heard, talked of, approved, and respected by the people 
about him and within his knowledge." And, of all known distinc- 
tions, none is so universally bewitching as ''an illustrious descent." 
One drop of royal blood, thought Mr. Adams, though illegitimately 
scattered, will make any man proud or vain ; and why ? Because 
it attracts the attention of mankind. Hence the wisdom and virtue 
of all nations have endeavored to utilize this passion, by regulating 
and legitimating it, by giving it objects to pursue, such as orders in 
the magisti'acy, titles of honor, insignia of office, — ribbons, stars, 
garters, golden keys, marshals' batons, white sticks, rings, the ivory 
chair, the official robe, the coronet. And this has been done most of 
all in republics, where there is no monarch, to overtop and over- 
shadow every one. Mr. Adams was most decided in his advocacy of 
the hereditary principle. "Nations," he remarked, "perceiving 
that the still small voice of merit was drowned in the insolent roar 
of the dupes of impudence and knavery in national elections, without 
a possibility of remedy, have sought for something more permanent 
than the popular voice to designate honor." Some of the nations, he 
continued, had annexed honor to the possession of land ; others to 
office ; others to birth ; but the policy of Europe had been to 
unite these, and bestow the highest honors of the state upon men 
who had land, office, and ancestors. To the landed and privileged 
aristocracy of birth, Europe, according to the vice-president, owed 
'' her superiority in war and peace, in legislation and commerce, in 
agriculture, navigation, arts, sciences, and manufactures." In this 
strain Mr. Adams continued to discourse, week after week, until he 
had published thirty-one numbers ; when the public indignation 
alarmed the printer, and gave pause even to the impetuous author. 
Or, to use Mr. Adams's own language, written twenty-three years 
after : " The rage and fury of the Jacobinical journals against these 
discourses increased as they proceeded, intimidated the printer, John 
Fenno, and convinced me that to proceed would do more hurt than 
good." 

For we must ever bear in mind, in reading of this period, that 
every utterance of a political nature hy a person of note was read in 
the lurid and distorting light cast over the nations by the French 



872 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

Revolution. Prom the fall of the Eastille in 1789, to the seizure of 
the supreme power by Bonaparte 1799, civilized man was mad. 
The news from France was read in the more advanced nations with 
a frenzied interest ; for, besides being in itself most strange and tragic, 
it either flattered or rebuked every man's party feelings, helped or 
hindered every man's party dream or scheme. Each ship's budget 
was fuel to party fires, — both parties ; for the news which flat- 
tered one enraged the other. 

Mr. Adams had made up his mind respecting the French Kevolu- 
tiou at once. He knew it to be wholly diabolical. No good could 
come of it. In these ver}' Discourses, all written, as he says, to 
counteract the new Frencli ideas, he did not hesitate to denounce 
the most vaunted proceedings of the popular party. In his old age, 
when Bonaparte's coarse and heavy hand made life more burden- 
some to nearly every virtuous family in Christendom, he was proud 
indeed to point, in the seventeenth of his Davila papers, to this sen- 
tence : " If the wild idea of annihilating the nobility should spread 
far and be long persisted in, the men of letters and the national 
assembly, as democratical as they may think themselves, will find 
no barrier against despotism." This in 1790, when Bonaparte was 
a yellow, thin little lieutenant of artillery twenty-two years old. 
He wrote the sentence, as he himself records, in the historic mansion 
upon Richmond Hill, near ISTew York, at a moment when- the view 
from his windows afforded him another proof of man's inhei'ent love 
of distinctions. A deputation of Creek Indians were encamped 
within sight and hearing; and even among them there were " gran- 
dees, warriors, and sachems." 

Neither this honest Adams nor the more adroit Hamilton — both 
public-spirited and patriotic — seem to have had any glimmering of 
the truth, so familiar to us, that institutions, like all things else, having 
served their turn, grow old, get past service, become obstructive, and 
die. Their discourses upon government read like the remarks that 
might be made by a young lobster of ability and spirit against the 
custom which has long prevailed in the lobster tribe of changing 
their shells. The ardent representative of young lobsterdom might 
point to the undeniable fact, that the old shell§ had answered an 
excellent purpose, had proved sufficient, had protected them in storm, 
and adorned them' in calm. He might further descant upon the 
known inconveniences of change ; the languor, the sickness, the 



TONE OF NEW-YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 873 

emaciation, the feverish struggle out of the time-honored incase- 
ment, and the long insecurity while the new armor was getting hard- 
ness and temper. Every word true. The only answer is : The time 
of year has come for a change ; we must get other shells, or stop 
growing. As long as people generallj^ are childlike* enough to be- 
lieve in the fictions upon which kingly authority rests, so long the 
institution of monarchy assists and blesses them, as the dail}'^ mass 
solaced and exalted Columbus, Isabella, the great Prince Heiuy of 
Portugal, and all the noblest and most gifted of that age ; but 
when faith declines, and knowledge is in the ascendent, kings 
become ridiculous, and the most touching ceremonials of the past 
are an emjity show. 

Mr. Adams protested he could see no difference between the rich 
families of Boston and the great houses of a European city. "You 
and I," he wrote to his kinsman, Samuel Adams, in October, 1790, 
" have seen four noble families rise up in Boston, — the Crafts, 
Gores, Dawes, and Austins. These are as really a nobility in 
our town as the Howards, Somersets, Berties, in England." And 
when Samuel Adams remarked that " the love of liberty is inter- 
woven in the soul of man," John Adams, vice-president of the 
United States, replied, ''' So it is, according to La Fontaine, in that 
of a wolf." 

i In 1790 Jefferson could scarcely have found in New York three 
drawing-rooms in which such sentiments as these were uncongenial 
with the prevailing temper. Mr. Jay, generally in accord with 
Hamilton, had suggested, in 1787, a governor-general of great 
powers, and senators ajipointed for life. General Knox, secretary 
of war, a soldier and nothing but a soldier, would have swept away 
at a stroke all the State governments, and established a standing 
army. With regard to the sentiment of equality which was assert- 
ing itself in Prance with so much emphasis, it was all but unknown 
in the United States. What Miss Sedgwick records in her auto- 
biography of her father, an important public man of this period, was 
true then of nearly every person in liberal circumstances in town or 
country : " He was born too soon to relish the freedoms of democracy; 
and I have seen his'brow lower when a free-and-easy mechanic came 
to 'Ci\(i front door; and, upon one occasion, I remember his turning off 
the east steps (I am sure not kicking, but the demonstration was 
unequivocal), a grown-up lad who kept his hat on after being told to 



374 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

take it off." Gentlemen of the period found no difficultly in jnelding 
assent to the doctrine of human equality when they heard it melo- 
diously read on the Fourth of July from the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence ; but how hard to miss the universal homage once paid them 
as " gentlemen " ! Many of them spoke with a curious mixture of 
wonder, scorn, and derision of what they seemed to think was a new 
French notion, " the contagion of levelism " as Chauncey Goodrich 
st^'led it. "What folly is it,"' asked this son of Connecticut, " that 
has set the world agog to be all equal to French barbers ? It must 
liave its run." 

What a change for Jefferson was the New York of- 1790, from 
such a city as Paris was in 1789 ! His dearest and deepest convic- 
tions openly and everywhere abhorred or despised ! The worn-out, 
obstructive institutions of the past, the acttursed fruits of which had 
excited in: him a constant and vast commiseration for five years, 
extolled on every side as the indispensable conditions of human wel- 
fare ! 

Hamilton and Jefferson met, — the man of action and the man of 
feeling. Jefferson had brought with him, so far as appears, no preju- 
dice against his colleague. In Paris he had recommended an 
English suitor, who had claims in America, "to apply to Colonel 
Hamilton (who was aid to General Washington), and is now very 
eminent at the bar, and much to be relied on." Nor is Hamilton 
known to have had any dislike to Jefferson. Naturally the man of 
executive force and the man of high qualities of mind regard one 
another with even an exaggerated respect. The mutual homage of 
Sir Walter Scott, poet and man of letters, and James Watt, the 
sublime mechanic, was not less natural than pleasing. In the pres- 
ence of the genius who had cheered and charmed his life, and 
enriched his country's fame, making mountainous and unfertile 
Scotland dear to half the world. Watt looked upon his steam-engine 
as something small, commonplace, material ; and, at the same instant, 
Scott was saying to himself. How petty are my light scribblings com- 
pared with the solid good this great man has done the world ! This 
is the natural feeling between men of opposite excellences and noble 
character, who meet, as a sultan of the East might meet a monarch 
of the West, equals, without being rivals. It was otherwise with 
these two men, Jefferson and Hamilton. In their case, there were 
so many causes of antipathy, noble and ignoble, external and inter- 



TONE OP NEW-YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 3T5 

nal, that nothing short of thorough breeding in both could have kept 
them well with one another. 

There is no contest so little harmful as an open one. The English 
people have originated no governmental device better than the 
arrangement of their parliament, by which the administration mem- 
bers sit facing the opposition, and the leaders of the two bodies fight 
it out openly in the hearing of mankind. These two men should 
have been avowed opponents, not colleagues, and debated publicly 
the high concerns respecting which they were bound to differ ; so as 
to correct while exasperating one another ; so as to inform, at once, 
and stimulate the public mind. Hamilton's fluency and self-confi- 
dence would have given him the advantage for a while ; but Jeffer- 
son would have had the American people behind him, since it was 
his part to marshal them the way they were to go. 



CHAPTER XLIL 

THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 

"We are in a wilderness, without a single footstep to guide us." 
Thus wrote Madison to Jefferson, in June, 1789, frotia his seat in 
Congress, when President Washington, not yet three months in 
o^ce, and without a cabinet, was surveying the thousand diiBculties 
of his position: "the whole scene," as the gloomy mind of Fisher 
Ames conceived it, "a deep, dark, and dreary chaos.". 

The government of the United States at that moment consisted 
of General Washington, Congress, and a roll of parchment: the 
last named being the Constitution, the sole guide out of the "wil- 
derness" of which Mr. Madison wrote. Pootstep there was none. 
' No nation had travelled that way before ; though all nations may 
be destined to follow the path which the United States have since 
"blazed " and half beaten. Every thing was to be done, and there 
seemed nothing to do it with, not even money to pay the govern- 
ment's board ; there being as yet no treasury, no treasurer, and no 
treasure. And worse : this outline, this sketch, this shadowy 
promise of a government, was confronted with what seemed to the 
simple souls of the time a giant debt, — a thousand-armed Briareus, 
— debt in all forms, paper of every kind known to impecunious 
man. The total approached fifty-four millions of dollars, to say 
nothing of the debts of the several States, amounting to twenty-one 
millions more. Worst of all, fifteen millions of the general debt 
was arrears of interest ! Hence, the credit of the government was 
low; not so low as that of the late Congress, whose Promise to 
Pay Bearer one dollar had passed, as monej'-, in 1787, for eight 
cents ; but so low that the money lent it to subsist upon for the 
first few months was lent chiefly as a mark of confidence in the 
men who solicited it. 
376 



THE CABmET OF PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 377 

There was not mucli real money in the country. No one, not 
even the richest man, could raise a large sum of unquestionable 
cash. The estate of General Washington was extensive, and not 
so unproductive as many; but, during the first year and a half of 
his presidency, he was often embarrassed, and was once obliged to 
raise money on his own note to Tobias Lear, at two per cent a 
month, in order to enable " The Steward of the Household " to pay 
off the butcher and the grocer before leaving for Mount Vernon. 
Years later we find the secretary of the treasury taken to task in 
Congress for presuming to advance the president a quarter's salary. 
The first Congress was paid, in part, by anticipating the duties at 
the custom-houses, each member receiving a certificate of indebted- 
ness, which the collectors were required to receive for duties. The 
personal credit of the secretary of the treasury (when at last there 
was one) helped members to many a liberal shave, and lured from 
the Bank of New York several timely loans, which kept the life in 
a starving government. 

"What are we to do with this heavy debt?" the new president 
asked of Robert Morris, who had so long superintended the finances 
of the Confederacy, both in war and in peace. The answer was, 
" There is but one man in the United States who can tell you : 
that is Alexander Hamilton." Colonel Hamilton agreed with 
Kobert Morris in this opinion. He had had an eye upon the office 
of secretary of (lie treasury : not from any common-place ambition ; 
but because, feeling equal to the post, he believed he could be of 
more service in it than in any other. " I can restore the public 
credit," said he to Gouverneur Morris. It was not in the nature of 
that cool, consummate disciple of Epicurus to sympathize with the 
spirit of martyrdom ; and hence he endeavored to dissuade his 
young friend from encountering the obloquy and distrust which 
then so often assailed ministers of finance. Hamilton's reply was, 
that he expected calumny and persecution. "But," said he, "I am 
convinced it is the situation in which I can do most good." Wash- 
ington was scarcely sworn in before he told Hamilton he meant to 
offer him the department of finance ; and the next day Colonel 
Hamilton called upon his old comrade, Colonel Troup, then a 
thriving lawyer in New York, and asked him if he would undertake 
to wind up his law business. Troup remonstrated against his 
making so great a sacrifice. Hamilton replied to him as to Morris, 



378 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

that tlie impression upon his mind was strong, that, in the place 
offered him, he could essentially promote the welfare of the country. 
Without heing devoid of a proper and even strong desire to distin- 
guish himself, doubtless he accepted the office in the spirit in which 
he urged some of his friends to take places under the experimental 
government. "If it is possible, my dear Harrison," he wrote to 
one of those who shrank from the toil, the wandering, and poverty 
of the Supreme Bench, " give yourself to us. We want men like 
you." Good and able men were wanted, because, as he said in the 
same letter, " I consider the business of America's happiness as yet 
to be done ! " 

It is the privilege of Americans, despite the efforts of so many 
misinterpreters of the men of that time, to believe that every 
member of General Washington's administration accepted office in 
the same high, disinterested spirit. Every one of them sacrificed 
his pecuniary interest, and most of them sacrificed their inclina- 
tions, to aid in giving the government a start. The salaries 
attached to their places were almost as insufficient as they are now. 
Not a man of them lived upon his ofiicial income, any more than 
the members of the government of to-day live upon theirs. In 
1.789 there seemed' (but only seemed) a necessity for fixing the 
salaries of the dozen men upon whom the success of the system 
chiefly depended, at such a point that their service was generosity 
as much as duty. There is an impression that we owe to Jefferson 
the system of paying extravagantly low salaries to high men. Not 
so. He was far too good a republican to favor an idea so aristo- 
cratic. Make offices desirable, he says, if you wish to get superior 
men to fill them. In giving his ideas respecting the proposed new 
constitution for Virginia, he dwelt upon this point, and returned to 
it. There is nothing in the writings of Jefferson which gives any 
show of support to temptation salaries or to ignorant suffrage, — 
the bane and terror of our present politics. 

Henry Knox, whom President Washington appointed secretary 
of war, had been, before the Revolution, a thriving Boston book- 
seller, with so strong a natural turn for soldiering that he belonged 
to two military companies at once, and' read all the works in his 
shop which treated of military things. From Bunker Hill, where 
he served as volunteer aid to General Artemas Ward, to Yorktown, 
where he commanded and ably directed the artillery, he was an 



THE CABINET OF PEESIDENT WASHINGTON. 379 

efficient, faithful soldier; and after the war, being retained in 
service, he had the chief charge of the military affairs of the Con- 
federacy, high in the confidence of the disbanded army and its 
chief He was a man of large, athletic frame, tall, deep-chested, 
loud-voiced, brave, deligliting in the whirl and rush of field-artillery 
and the thunder of siege-guns. But a secretary of war is the 
adviser of the head of the government on all subjects ; and General 
Knox was only acquainted with one. Nor' was he a man of capa- 
cious and inquisitive mind. He was one who must take his opinions 
from another mind, or not have any opinions. But such men, since 
they lack the only thing in human nature which is progressive, — 
original intelligence, — have usually a. bias toward what we now 
call the conservative side of politics. [^Ve hear sometimes of " the 
car of progress." Intellect alone appears to be the engine which \V 
draws that celebrated vehicle, ever}'- thing else within us being '' 
burden or brake. 1 Not only are indolence, ignorance, timidity, and 
habit conservative, but love and imagination also cling fondly to 
the old way, to the old house at heme, and to all things ancient and 
sanctioned; so that, often, the highest genius in the community 
and its stolidest clodhopper belong to the same political party. 
Thackeray owned that he preferred the back seat in the car afore- 
said, because it commanded a view of the country which had been 
traversed, — Queen Anne's reign, instead of Queen Victoria's ; 
and we observe the same tendency in most men of illustrious giftg. 

It is only intellect, the fearless and discerning mind, that dis- 
covers the better path, or welcomes the news that a better path 
has been discovered. Happy the land where this priceless force has 
free play : for, small as it ever is in quantitj^, we owe to it every 
step that man has made from the condition of the savage. 

General Knox had much faith in the tools he was accustomed to 
use. His original remedy for the ills of the Confederacy was as sim- 
ple and complete as a patent medicine : Extinguish the State gov- 
ernments, and establish an imposing general government, with 
plent}^ of soldiers to enforce its decrees. In the cabinet of Presi- 
dent Washington, he was the giant shadow of his diminutive friend 
Hamilton. Wli^ Hamilton had spoken, Knox was usually ready 
to say in substance, " My own opinion, better expressed." 

These two men were established as members of the cabinet as 
early as September, 1789, Mr. Jay continuing to serve as secre- 



380 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSO]S". 

tary for foreign affairs ; and all of them were highly valued by 
their chief. How honorable and how right was the conduct of 
this group of men in setting the government in motion! What an 
honest soul breathes in this first note which the president ever 
wrote to the secretary of the treasury' : " From a great variety of 
characters, who have made a tender of tlieir services for suitable 
offices, I have selected the following. If Mr. Jay and you will 
take the further trouble of running them over, to see if among them 
there can be found one, who, under all circumstances, is more eligi- 
ble for the post-of&ce than Colonel , I shall be obliged to you 

for your opinion thereon by eleven o'clock. Another paper, which 
is enclosed, will show how the appointments stand to this time. 
And that you may have the vndittQic fully before you, I shall add, 
that it is my j^J'escnt intention to nominate Mr. Jefferson for secre- 
tary of state, and Mr. Edmund Randolph as attorney-general; 
though their acceptance is problematical, especially the latter." 

It was in this spirit that every thing was done, — public good 
the object, patient inquiry the means. 

Edmund Eandolph, who accepted the post of attorney-general, 
besides being a Randolph and a Virginian, had this claim to the 
regard of General Washington : he had been disinherited by his 
father for siding with the E-evolution. He was a rising lawyer 
twenty-two years of age when his father, the king's attorney-gen- 
eral, withdrew to England, — an act upon which the son commented 
by mounting his horse, and riding by the side of General Wash- 
ington as his volunteer aid, until the general could organize his 
military househpld. This marked "discrepancy" cost the young 
man his estate, and made his fortune. )The next year, 1776, young 
as he was, Virginia sent him to the convention which called upon 
Congress to declare independence. At twentj'-six he was a mem- 
ber of the war Congress, in which he served three years, and at 
tliirty-three was governor of Virginia. Being a Randolph, we 
might infer, even without Mr. Wirt's full-length portrait of him in 
the British Spy, that he was a man of great but peculiar talents, — 
resembling his eccentric kinsman, John Randolph of a later day, 
but sounder and stronger than that meteoric personage. Tall, 
meagre, emaciated, loose-jointed, awkward, with small head, and a 
face dark and wrinkled, nothing in his appearance denoted a superior 
person excfept his eyes, which were black and most brilliant. Mr. 



THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 381 

Wirt, who knew bim some years later, when, after much public 
service, he had resumed the leadership of the Virginia bar, tells us 
that he owed his supremacy there to a single facultj', that of seeing 
and seizing at once the real point at issue in a controversy. " No 
matter what the question," says Mr. Wirt, "though ten times more 
knotty than the gnarled oak, the lightning of heaven is not more 
rapid nor more resistless than his astonishing penetration. Nor 
does the exercise of it seem to cost him an effort. On the contrary, 
it is as easy as vision." John Randolph possessed a residuum of 
the same talent in his power of condensing one side of a question 
into an epigram of ten words, which pierced every ear, and stuck in 
every memory. 

But Edmund Randolph, keen and bold as he was before judge 
and jury, where the responsibility of deciding lay with others, was 
timid and hesitatirrg when it was his part to utter the decisive 
word. He saw clearly, he saw correctly ; but, when the time came 
to vote, his ingenious mind conjured up difficulties, and he often 
gave his voice to the side his head disapproved, — his argument sup- 
porting one party and his vote the other ; or, as Jefferson expressed 
it, he sometimes gave the shells to his friends, and the oyster to his 
enemies. Most men, whose, profession it has long been to use 
words, would experience the same difficulty when called upon to 
deal with things ; so much easier is it to be eloquent than to be 
wise. How confident the hero of the platform or of the editorial 
page ! what vigorous blows he gets in at enemies, remote or ima- 
ginary ! how striking the skill with which he barbs, and the audacity 
with which he shoots, the poisoned arrow which will rankle a life- 
time in an unseen breast ! But put the same man in a situation 
which requires him on his honor to decide the smallest practical 
question, and his confidence is gone. A government of orators and 
editors would never do, unless at or near the head of it there was 
one unfluent man trained in the great art of making up his mind. 

Such were the gentlemen who were gathered round the council- 
table at the president's house in New York in 1790. How inter- 
esting the group! At the head of the table. General Washington, 
now fifty-eight, his frame as erect as ever, but his face showing 
deep traces of the thousand anxious hours he had passed. Not 
versed in the lore of schools, not gifted with a great sum of intel- 
lect, the eternal glory of this man is, that he used all the mind he 



382 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

had in patient endeavors to find ont the right way ; ever on the 
watch to keep out of his decision every thing like bias or prejudice ; 
never deciding till he had exhausted every source of elucidation 
within his reach. Some questions he could not decide with his own 
mind; and he knew he could not. In such cases, he bent all his 
powers to ascertaining how the subject appeared to minds fitted to 
grapple with it, and getting tJieni to view it without prejudice. 

I am delighted to learn that Mr. Carlylo can seldom hear the 
name of Washington pronounced without breakijxg forth with an 
explosion of contempt, especially, it is said, if tliere is an American 
within hearing. Washington is the exact opposite of a fell Car- 
lylean hero. His glory is, that he was not richly endowed, not 
sufficient unto himself, not indifferent to human rights, opinions, 
and preferences; but feeling deej)!}'- his need of help, sought it, 
where alone it was to be found, — in minds Ktted by nature and 
training to supply his lack. It is this heartfelt desire to be right 
which shines so afifectingl}' from the plain words of Washington, 
and gives him rank so far above the gorgeous bandits whom hero- 
worshippers adore. 

On the right of the president, — in the place of honor, — sat 
Jefferson, now forty-seven, the senior, of all his colleagues ; older 
in public service, too, than any of them ; tall, erect, ruddy ; noticea- 
bly' quiet and unobtrusive in his address and demeanor ; the least 
pugnacious of men. Not a fanatic, not an enthusiast; but an 
old-fashioned Whig, nurtured upon "old Coke," enlightened by 
twenty-five years' intense discussion, — with pen, tongue, and 
sword, — of Cokean principles. Fresh from the latest commentary 
upon Coke, — the ruins of the Bastille, — and wearing still his red 
Paris waistcoat and breeches, he was an object of pai-ticular interest 
to all men, and doubtless often relieved the severity of business 
by some thrilling relation out of his late foreign experience. 

Opposite him, on the president's left, was the place of Hamilton, 
secretary of the treasury, in all the alertness and vigor of thirty- 
three years. If time had matured his talents, it had not lessened 
his self-sufficiency ; because, as yet, all his short life had been suc- 
cess, and he had associated chiefly with men who possessed nothing 
either of his fluency or his arithmetic. A positive, vehement little 
gentleman, with as firm a faith in the apparatus of finance as Gen- 
eral Knox had in great guns. He was now in the full tide of activ- 



THE CABINET qjP PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 383 

ity, lobbying measures tbrougli Congress, and organizing tlie treasury 
department; the most conspicuous man in the administration, 
except the president. As usual, his unseen work was his best. In 
organizing a sj'stem of collecting, keeping, and disbursing the rev- 
enue, he employed so much tact, forethought, and fertility, that his 
successors have each, in turn, admired and retained his most impor- 
tant devices. He arranged the system so that the secretary of the 
treasury, at any moment, could survey the whole working of it ; and 
he held at command all the resources of the United States, subject 
to lawful use, without being able to divert one dollar to a purpose 
not specially authorized. He could not draw his own pittance of 
salary without the signatures of the four chief officers of the depart- 
ment, — comptroller, auditor, treasurer, and register. 

''Hamilton and I," Jefferson wrote, " were pitted against each 
other every day in the cabinet, like two fighting-cocks." Age had 
not quenched the vivacity of either of the four secretaries : Jeffer- 
son, forty-seven ; Knox, forty ; Randolph, thirty-seven ; Hamilton, 
thirty-three. When, in the world's history, was so young a group 
charged with a task so new, so difficult, so momentous ? At first, 
what good friends they were ! No " opposition," in the party sense, 
seems to have been thought of. "I remember," said a lady who 
was living in 1858, " how Hamilton and Madison would talk together 
in the summer [of 1789], and then turn and laugh and play with a 
monkey that was climbing in a neighbor's yard." But how suddenly 
was all this changed when the administration set to work in ear- 
nest ! An opposition sprang into being full-formed. By the time 
Jefferson took his seat in the cabinet, it had attained even menacing 
proportions ; and it was chiefly due to Hamilton's inexperience and 
precipitation, his ignorance of man, and his ignorance of America. 



CHAPTER XLIII. 

THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 

In September, 1789, when his appointment to the place of minis- 
ter of finance had set the seal of Washington's approval to his repu- 
tation, Hamilton's position before the country was commanding. 
The dead corpse of the public credit, of which Mr. Webster spoke 
(repeating the tradition of his father's fireside), took a startling leap, 
even before Hamilton could be supposed to have " touched " it : thirty- 
three per cent from January to November. Tlie mere establishment 
of a government, "clothed," as Hamilton expressed it, "with powers 
capable of calling forth the resources of the community," had wrought 
this third part of a miracle. The appointment of Hamilton, who 
was known to be in favor of using those powers to the uttermost, 
accelerated the rise, which received a further impetus when Con- 
gress, late in September, before adjourning over till January, referred 
the knotty subject of the public credit to the secretary of the treas- 
ury, requesting him to report a plan for its restoration. He threw 
himself upon this work with honorable ardor, not disdaining to con- 
sult Madison, Morris, and all accessible men competent to advise 
on a matter so full of diflSculty. The rumor of what he intended 
to recommend had such eifect upon the market, that the debt rose 
in price fifty per cent more in the last two months of 1789 ; making 
a rise of eighty-three per cent in the year. The day on which the 
report was read in the House of Eepresentatives, January 14, 1790, 
was memorable for the throng of eager auditors that gathered to 
hear it in gallery and lobby, and the breathless interest with \\'hich 
so difficult a paper was listened to. The Senate still sat with closed 
doors, in secrecy meant to be awful ; but the public were admitted 
to what the Federalists were pleased to designate the Lower House. 

Hamilton's report on the public credit i» one of the most inter- 

884 



THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 385 

esting documents in the archives of the United States. It began 
the strife of parties under tlie new Constitution. It was hailed 
with triumphant rapture by the moneyed few, and received by the 
landed many with doubt and distrust, which soon became opposition, 
hostility, rancor, mania. 

How much does the reader suppose the Revolution cost per 
annum ? Seventeen millions and a half of dollars ; about ten days' 
expenditure of the late war. Such was " the price of liberty." 
The debt of the United States in January, 1790, was $54,124,464. 
56; of which, as before remarked, nearly fifteen millions were 
arrears of interest; and, besides this general debt, there was a chaos 
of State debts, amounting, as the secretary erroneously computed, to 
twenty-five millions more. Not eighty millions in all ; not a 
month's expenditure during the Rebellion. But if the billions of 
our present debt were multiplied by two, the stupeadous total would 
not affright us half as much as these figures did the peojile of 1790, 
four millions in number, mostly farmers and fishermen, without 
steam, without cotton, without the mines, without a West. It was 
a grave question with intelligent men, whether it was possible for 
the country to pay the. interest, and carry on the general government 
at the same time. The expenses of supporting the government 
could not be kept, Hamilton thought, under six hundred thousand 
dollars a year, and the interest of the whole debt was four millions 
and a half Would the country stand such a drain ? The secretary 
thought it possible, but not probable. "It would require," he said, 
"an extension of taxation to a degree and to objects which the true 
interest of the public creditor forbids." This was a polite way of 
stating the case, but the meaning was sufficiently clear : The people 
will not bear a tax of a dollar and a quarter each per annum. What 
then? 

The secretary's answer to this question was. Fund the debt at a 
lower rate of interest. But how could a country borrow at a lower 
rate, which already owed fifteen millions of unpaid interest? It 
was in answering this question that the young financier displayed 
too much ingenuity and not enough wisdom. He answered it very 
much as John Law would have done, if John Law had been a man 
of honor. His suggestions were so numerous, so complex, and so 
refined, as to suggest to opponents the idea that he had contrived 
them on purpose to puzzle the people. Nothing could be more 

25 



386 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

unjust. He was a financier of tliirfcy-tliree, whose mind was as full 
of ideas as his pockets were empty of money and his life devoid of 
experience. But every page of his report is warm with tlie passion 
of honesty wliich possessed the author's mind. If some cool, prac- 
tised man of the world, like Gouverneur Morris, had gone over this 
report, stricken out three out of every four of Hamilton's ingenuities, 
kept his best ideas, and given them the simplest expression, an ad- 
mirable result might have been attained. But what could the most 
uncommercial and uncapitalled of all people on earth be expected 
to think of a scheme which would require the United States to em- 
bark in the business of selling annuities, and contracting loans "on 
the principles of a tonthie, to consist of six classes"? I think I 
see the country gentleman of the period puzzling over the secretary's 
lucid explanations of the annuity business : " One hundred dollars, 
bearing an interest of six per cent for five years, or five per cent for 
fifteen years, and thenceforth of four per cent (these being the 
successiv(3 rates of interest in the market), is equal to a capital of 
$122.510725, bearing an interest of four per cent; which, con- 
verted into a capital bearing a fixed rate of interest of six per cent, 
is equal to $81.6738166." 

A valuable suggestion was to turn the waste lands to account in 
paying part of the debt. He wished to raise one loan by giving 
every holder of the debt the option to fund his whole amount at six 
per cent, or, receiving one-third of it in land at twenty cents an acre, 
fund the rest at four per cent. Another loan of ten millions he pro- 
posed to effect on Law's own plan of utilizing depreciated bonds : 
every man subscribing one hundred dollars, to pay half in money 
and the other half in Congress paper; the whole to bear an interest 
of five per cent. A third scheme was founded upon the erroneous 
opinion, that the rate of interest would decline from six per cent to 
four in a few years. Besides suggesting six different jdans of luring 
money from the public in aid of tlie government, he proposed a stiff 
duty upon liquors, wines, tea, and coffue. But even his tariff had 
the vice of complication. Each grade of tea (four in number) had 
its special rate of duty ; and every barrel of liquor was to be tested by 
" Dica's hydrometer," to ascertain exactly how many degrees it was 
above or below proof There were to be six rates upon liquor; 
beginning with twenty cents a gallon upon spirits ten per cent 
below proof, and rising to forty cents a gallon if it were forty per 



THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 387 

cent above proof. If the report had been contrived, as some of its 
heated opponents charged, to jierplex the people and multiply cus- 
tom-honse officers, it could hardly have been better done. Even the 
loans on ''the tontine plan" were to be of "six classes." 

Congress, of course, disregarded the refinements and the ingenui- 
ties, and adopted the substance of the report j the opposition con- 
centrating upon two points. 

The public debt, as the secretary remarked, was '^ the price of 
liberty." The veterans of the Revolution, a kind of sacred class at 
this period, had been the most numerous original holders of it ; and 
many of them, through the failure of Congress to pay the interest, 
had been obliged to sell their claims for a small fraction of their 
amount. It was not as when a poor widow in a hard time sells her 
diamond for a quarter of its value ; for, in the case of the Revolution- 
ary soldier, it was neither his fault nor his necessity that lessened 
the value of his property, but the government's inability to keep its 
promise. Hence there was a wide-spread feeling in the country, 
that, in funding the debt, original holders should be credited with 
the full amount of their claims ; but the " speculator " should receive 
only what he had paid for his certificate, with interest, and the rest 
should go to the original holder. The secretary of the treasury, 
anticipating this opinion, argued against it with equal ability and 
good feeling. Probably there is not to-day a man in Wall Street 
nor in the Treasury Department at Washington who will not give 
his approval to Hamilton's reasoning upon this ^oint. But, in 
1790, an immense number of the most able and just-minded men 
denounced it with bitterness. What ! pay a speculator a thousand 
dollars, with ten years' arrears of interest, for a bond which he had 
bought from a veteran of the Eevolution for a hundred and fifty! 
Yes, even so; because it is not in the power of so cumbrous a thing 
as a goveruQient to execute any scheme for avoiding this twofold 
wrong which would not cause more wrong than it would prevent. 
To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not 
shall be taken away that which they have. Such is the scheme of 
the universe, which man's devices can but regulate and mitigate ; 
but, in a large number of instances, this profoundly beneficent law 
appears to the sufferers to work sheer cruelty. After a long and 
severe struggle, in which Madison strove worthily for the soldiers' 
interest. Congress accepted Hamilton's conclusion as the law of 
necessity governing the case. 



388 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIST. 

This contest was at its height while Jefferson was floundering 
through the mud from Virginia to New York. Immersed at once 
upon his arrival in the business of his own department, and having a 
dislike of financial questions, he took no part in the strife. But 
Hamilton, unhappily, had cumbered his report with a recommenda- 
tion that Congress should assume tlie debts of the States. To him, 
born in a little sugar-island, from which he had early escaped, and 
therefore unable to comprehend or sympathize with the hereditary 
love of the native citizen for the State in which he was born, nothing 
seemed more natural or more proper than this sweeping measure. 
Debt is debt. The people of the United States owe this money. 
How much better to arrange it all under the same system ! He sur- 
veyed this tangled scene of debt as Bonaparte may be supposed to 
have looked upon the map of Europe \Yhen he was about to piece 
out a new kingdom for one of his brothers. Here is a nice little 
duchy to round off that corner; this pretty province will make a 
capital finish to the western boundary ; and, to fill up this gap on 
the north, we'll gouge a piece out of the king of Prussia, poor devil. 
The reader, perhaps, in looking upon the map of New England, has 
sometimes thought wliat an improvement it would be to the sym- 
metry of things to obliterate the lines which make Rhode Island a 
separate State, with its own apparatus of government ; not expen- 
sive, indeed, but superfluous. If the reader has ever had this bold 
thought, let him, the next time he finds himself in Thames Street, 
Newport, propose the scheme of merging Rhode Island into Massa- 
chusetts to the inhabitants of that too narrow thoroughfare. The 
idea will seem to the worthy sons of Newport too preposterous to be 
considered; but if you could succeed in convincing one of them that 
the plan was seriously entertained, with some remote possibility of 
success, you would perhaps discover why Hamilton's plan of assump- 
tion excited, not disapproval merely, but passion. It cut deeply into 
State pride. It gave the party which had held out longest against 
the new Constitution an opportunity to turn upon the Federalists 
with a bitter, Did we not tell you so? What is this but consolida- 
tion? 

Besides, the rapid rise in the value of the public debt, and 
especially the jump towards par which it gave when the funding reso- 
lution was passed, had had the usual effect (so familiar to us of this 
generation) of enriching several individuals not the most estimable 



THE NEW GOVERNJyiENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 389 

of men, and of luring from honest industry a considerable class of 
speculators. Whoever saw exaggerated Wall Street when gold was 
going up and down the scale at ten per cent a week, or whoever has 
read of the precisely similar scenes in Paris when Louis XIV. had 
died insolvent, leaving France littered with every kind of fluctu- 
ating paper for John Law to operate with and upon, can form some 
idea of the horror excited in the unsophisticated minds of country 
members in 1790 by the spectacle of sudden wealth gained by spec- 
ulation in the public debt. As a rule, no sudden fortune is made 
without wrong to some and injury to many. It is in the highest 
degree undesirable for money to be made fast ; and, in a healthy, 
proper state of things, it will seldom be done. During the colonial 
period, it is questionable if one individual had made a fortune even 
in so short a period as ten years, except by wrecking or privateer- 
ing ; and privateer fortunes were proverbially demoralizing and 
evanescent. It was thought remarkable that Franklin should have 
gained a competence in twenty years by legitimate business, and he 
never ceased to speak of it himself with grateful wonder. And 
what made these paper fortunes of 1790 and 1791 so aggravating to 
country gentlemen was, the serious decline in the value of their own 
lands. In Hamilton's report upon the public credit occurs this sen- 
tence : " The value' of cultivated lands, in most of the States, has 
fallen, since the Revolution, from twenty to fifty per cent." And 
here were speculators in the public debt setting up their carriages 
in the face of honorable members of hereditary estates, hard put to 
it to pay their board! At that period, all Southern members were 
country members ; the whole south, except Charleston, being 
" country." 

On public grounds, too, the mania for getting rich in a week was 
deplorable, since it injured those who lost and spoiled those who 
gained. It was a true mania, as Hamilton himself admits. *' In 
the late delirium of speculation," he wrote, after the worst of it was 
over, "large sums [of the public debt] were purchased at twenty- 
five per cent above par and upwards ; " which was just what hap- 
pened when John Law "touched the corpse" of French credit in 
1717. " Since this report has been read," exclaimed a fiery 
member from Georgia, "a spirit of speculation and ruin has arisen, 
and been cherished by people who had an access to the information 
the report contained, that would have made a Hastings blush to 



390 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

have been connected with, though long inured to preying on the 
vitals of his fellow-men. Three vessels, sir, have sailed within a 
fortnight from this port, freighted for speculation : they are intend- 
ed to purchase up the State and other securities in the hands of the 
uninformed though honest citizens of North Carolina, South Caro- 
lina, and Georgia. My soul rises indignant at the avaricious and 
moral turj^itude wliich so vile a conduct displays." 

Thus the virtuous Georgian. And, indeed, few persons then 
I perceived the usefulness of speculators, — the men who employ 
■' themselves in applying the redundancy of one place to the scarcity 
of another. Too many nutmegs in London, not enou-gh nutmegs 
in New York : it is the speculator who remedies both evils at 
a stroke, with occasional advantage to himself. But how far a 
sjjeculator may honorably avail himself of special knowledge 
is a question upon which Wayland's Moral Pliilosophy (school 
edition) is clear and decisive, but which presents difficulties in 
practical life. Those three fast-sailing schooners play a great part 
in the journalism and politics of the time. Whether they were 
phantom vessels or genuine two-masted schooners is not certain, but 
they excited profound and general horror. " If any man burns his 
fingers,'" said the indignant Jackson of Georgia, "which I hope to 
God, with all the warmth of a feeling heart, they may, they will 
on\y have their own cupidity to blame." 

Now, the proposed assumption of the State debts, even if the 
principle could be admitted, even if the measure could be thought 
desirable or timely, was open to the obvious objection, that it would 
throw upon the market twenty-one millions more of the fuel that 
had caused this alarming conflagration. It'woidd be like putting 
gallons of tar into the furnace of a Mississippi steamboat already 
making nineteen miles an hour, with a colored boy on the safet}'^- 
valve ; a proceeding usually applauded by the gamblers and betting 
men on board, though extremely unpleasing to steady-going pas- 
sengers. 

Some of the States, moreover, had paid off half their war-debt; 
others were making strenuous efforts in that direction ; but some 
had not diminished their indebtedness at all, nor tried to do so. 
The proposed assumption placed all the States upon a level. The 
five foolish virgins were to have their lamps filled for them at the 
door of the mansion, and to be allowed to flaunt into the banquet- 



THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 391 

ing-room on the same footing as their wise companions. The bad 
apprentice and the good apprentice were each to marry liis master's 
daughter, inherit the business, and be lord-mayor. 

For these and other reasons, a small majority of the House (31 
to 29), in spite of the outcries of an arm}'- of creditors, and in spite 
of Hamilton's dazzling prestige and irrepressible resolution, rejected 
the plan of assumption. So acrimonious had been the debate, so 
intense the feeling on both sides, on the floor, in the lobby, in "the 
street," that when at last the rash scheme was rejected, it seemed 
as if the experiment of a general government had failed. Congress 
assembled every morning as usual, but onl}' to adjourn at once ; as 
the two sides were " too much out of temper to do business to- 
gether." It was a case of Town versus Country, North against 
South, centralism against the rights and dignity of the State gov- 
ernments. 

But why so much ill-humor ? Because Hamilton and his friends, 
the men who were conducting the experiment of Federal govern- 
ment by the people, had no faith in the principle. It was not in 
their blood to submit at once, without a word, to the decision of a 
majority. The cogent arguments of Madison and the Republican 
members against assumption, instead of instructing this brilliant 
young pupil of John Law, only irritated him, only made him the 
more resolute to carry his point, only convinced him the more that 
the people do not know what is best for them. He had an unteach- 
able mind. " I will not give him up yet," he said, when he heard 
of Madison's opposition ; as though it were a moral aberration in a 
friend to object to his measures ; and when it became clear that 
Madison was fixed in his Opposition, he had the immeasurable 
insolence to say, "Alas, poor human nature!" The idea never 
crossed his mind of dropping the scheme. And we may be sure, 
that, at such a time, the clamor of an interested lobby will make 
itself heard ; for the vote against assumption was a shivering blow 
to many a paper fortune, 

Mr. Madison, in his bright and happy old age, once gave Ills 
version of the reason why Hamilton and himself had separated in 
1790. Mr. Nicholas P. Trist preserves the anecdote. "I aban- 
doned Colonel Hamilton," said Madison, "or Colonel Hamilton 
abandoned me, -—in a word, we loarted, — upon its plainl}'- becom- 
ing his purpose and endeavor to administration the government 



392 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

into a thing totally different from that which he and I both knew 
perfectly well had been understood and intended by the Convention 
which framed it, and by the people in adopting it." 

In this extremity, to whom, of all men in tlie world, should 
Hamilton apply for assistance but Jefferson, his colleague of three 
weeks' standing, up to the eyes in the work of his own department ! 
Chance gave him the opportunity. On an April day, as the secre- 
tary of state was walking from his house, 54 Maiden Lane, to the 
president's mansion, at the corner of Pearl and Cherry Streets, 
Hamilton met and joined him, and broke into tlie topic that filled 
his mind. The distance being much too .short for his purpose, he 
"walked" his colleague to and fro in front of the president's house 
for half an hour, descanting upon the situation, dwelling especially 
upon the dangerous temper into which Congress had been wrought, 
and the fierce disgust of members whose States were supposed to 
have more to receive than to pay. That word of fearful omen, 
secession, was then first uttered in connection with the politics of 
the United States. There was danger, .Hamilton said, of the 
secession of the opposing members, and the separation of their 
States from the Union, At such a crisis, he thought, members of 
the administration should rally round the president, who was " the 
centre on which all administrative measures ultimately rested," and 
give a united support to such as he approved. This misinterpreta- 
tion of the situation shows us how" much he was "bewitched by the 
British form." The man was incapable of comprehending the 
crisis. There was no crisis, except of his own making. One of the 
suggestions of his report having been rejected by the House of 
Representatives, he and his friends had only to acquiesce in becom- 
ing silence, and all was well. But confused by their familiarity 
with the English system, excited by the clamor of the street, and 
having an ample share of false pride, the}'- must needs persist until 
they had produced a crisis. 

Thus appealed to, Jefferson fell back upon the expedient which 
had been so successful in Paris during the French crisis of August, 
1789, — a dinner. He told his anxious colleague that he was a 
stranger to the whole subject, not having yet informed himself of 
the system of finance adopted, and unable, therefore, to decide how 
far this measure of assuming the State debts was " a necessary 
sequence." But of one thing there could be no doubt : if its rejec- 



THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 393 

tion was really perilous to the Union at this early stage of its 
existence, all partial and temporary evils should be endured to avert 
that supreme catastrophe. ''Dine with me to-morrow," he con 
tinued, "and I will invite another friend or two, and bring you into 
conference together. I think it impossible that reasonable men, 
consulting together coolly, can fail, by some mutual sacrifices of 
opinion, to form a compromise which is to save the Union." 

The conference occurred. Jeiferson, as usual with him on such 
occasions, did not join in the discussion, but only exhorted his friends 
to conciliation, and quieted their minds by his serene presence. A 
compromise was effected ; but, unhappily, it was not a compromise 
of opinion. Contending interests had to be assuaged ; and thus a 
vast permanent wrong was done in order to tide over a temporary 
inconvenience. Nay, two permanent wrongs : log-rolling was in- 
vented, and the city of Washington was sprawled over the soft j 
banks of the Potomac. 

As early as September, 1789, the question of a capital of the 
United States had been debated in Congress, and debated with that 
warmth and irritation which such a subject excites always. A King 
loomed up dimly upon the imaginations of members, supposed to 
have been formed " out of doors," in order to fix the capital at 
"Wright's Ferry on the Susquehanna;" a place whicli has since 
developed into Wrightsville, containing, according to the Gazetteer, 
" two saw-mills, and thirteen hundred and ten inhabitants." Few, 
perhaps, of these thirteen hundred and ten inhabitants know what 
a narrow escape their secluded village had of being the capital of 
their country. The members from New England and New York 
agreed in preferring it, as the point nearest the centre of population, 
wealth, and convenience; and for many days it seemed to have a 
better chance than any of the other places proposed, — Harrisburg, 
Baltimore, New York, Germantown, Philadelphia. Wright's Ferry 
was shown in the debates to be the veritable "hub of the universe," 
a region favored by nature above others ; where, as one member 
remarked, not merely the soil, the water, and the " advantages of 
nature," were unsurpassed, but where, " if honorable gentlemen were 
disposed to pay much attention to a dish of fish, he could assure . 
them their table might be furnished with fine and good from the 
waters of the Susquehanna." 

But Wright's Ferry lost its chance through the opposition of the 



394 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Southern members ; and the Eing rumor was the ass's jawbone 
which they used to kill the project. "Preconcerted out of doors," 
said Madison. "I am sorry the people should learn," remarked 
the loud Jackson of Georgia, whose home was a thousand miles from 
Wright's Ferry, " that the members from New England and New 
York had fixed on a seat of government." Such a report, he 
thought, would "blow the coals of sedition, and endanger the 
Union." 

The members from New England and New York denied the offen- 
sive charge, and contended that Wright had fixed his ferry at the 
point which would be " the centre of population for ages yet to 
come." With regard to the country west of the Ohio, " an im- 
measurable wilderness," Fisher Ames was of opinion (and it was 
everybodj^'s opinion) that it was "perfectly romantic" to allow it 
any weight in the decision at all. " When it will be settled, or how 
it will be possible to govern it," said he, "is past calculation." 
Southern gentlemen, on the other hand, denied the " centrality " 
of Wright, and maintained that the shores of the noble Potomac 
presented the genuine centre to the nation's choice. The Potomac ! 
Horror ! A deadly miasma hung over its banks ; and no native of 
New England could remain there and live. "Vast numbers of 
Eastern adventurers," said Mr, Sedgwick of Massachusetts, " have 
gone to the Southern States, and all have found their graves there : 
they have met destruction as soon as they arrived." Centre of popu- 
lation ? " Yes," said Sedgwick, " if you count the slaves ; " but 
"if they were considered, gentlemen might as well estimate the 
black cattle of New England." 

One remark made by Madison in the course of this long and too 
warm discussion has a particular interest for us who live under a 
network of telegraphic wires. " If," said he, " it were possible to 
promulgate our laws by some instantaneous operation, it would be 
of less consequence, in that point of view, where the government 
might be placed." But even in that case, centralit}^, he thought, 
would be but just, since the government would probably expend 
every year as much as half a million of dollars, and every citizen 
should partake of this advantage as equally as Nature had rendered 
it possible. 

And so the debate went on day after day. The Susquehanna 
men triumphed in the House ; but the senate sent back the bill with 



THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 395 

" Susquehanna " stricken out, and " Germantown " inserted. The 
House would not accept the amendment, and the session ended 
before a place had been agreed upon. The subject being resumed 
in the spring of 1790, it was again productive of heat and recrimi- 
nation ; again the South was outvoted, and the Potomac rejected by 
a small majority. Baffled in the House, Southern men renewed 
their efforts over Mr. Jefferson's wine and hickory-nuts in IVIaiden 
Lane. Two sets of members were sour or savage from the loss of 
a measure upon which they had set their hearts : Southern men had 
lost the capital, and Northern men assumption. Then it was that 
the original American log-roller — name unrecorded — conceived the 
idea of this bad kmd of compromise. The bargain was this : two 
Southern members should vote for assumption, and so carry it; and, in 
return for this concession, Hamilton agreed to induce a few Northern 
members to change their votes on the question of the capital, and 
so fix it upon the Potomac. It was agreed, at length, that for the 
next ten years the seat of government should be Philadelphia, and 
finally near Georgetown. How much trouble would have been 
saved if some prophetic member had been strong enough to carry a 
very simple amendment, to strike out ten years, and insert one hun- 
dred ! And, in that case, what an agreeable task would have been 
devolved upon this generation, of repealing Georgetown, and begin- 
ning a suitable capital at the proper place ! 

To the last of his public life, Jefferson never ceased to regret the 
part he had innocently taken in this bargain. Even as a matter of 
convenience (leaving principle out of sight), he thought the separate 
States could reduce their chaos of debts to order, and put them in a 
fair way to be discharged, better, sooner, and cheaper, than it could 
be done by the general government. But, w^hile the crisis lasted,, 
the minds of all men were filled with dismay and apprehension ; for 
the threat of disunion had then lost none of its terrors by repetition 
and familiarity. The letters of the time are full of the perils of the 
situation. Jefferson himself, in a letter to his young friend Monroe, 
dated June 20, 1790, held this fearful language: " After exhausting 
their arguments and patience on these subjects, members have been 
for some time resting upon their oars, unable to get along as to these 
businesses, and indisposed to attend to any thing else till they are 
settled. And, in fine, it has become probable, that, unless they can 
be settled by some plan of compromise, there will be no funding- 



396 LIFB OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

bill agreed to, and our credit (raised by late prospects to be the first 
on the exchange at Amsterdam, where our paper is above par) will 
burst and vanish, and the States separate to take care every one of 
itself." 

And so Hamilton triumphed. The young republic rose in the 
estimation of all the money-streets of Christendom ; and in Amster- 
dam,' a few months later, a new United-States loan of two and a 
half millions of florins was filled in two hours and a half What a 
contrast from the time when all Mr. Adams's pertinacity and elo- 
I quence, united with Mr. Jefferson's tact and suavity, had only been 
able to wring florins enough from Holland to keep the servants of 
Congress in Europe supplied with the necessarie'^ of life ! At home 
the sudden increase in the A'-alue of the widely scattered debt enriched 
many people, improved the circumstances of more, and gave a lift 
to the whole country, America began to be. New York entered 
upon its predestined career. Corner-lots acquired value. But the 
corpse of the public credit, having got firmly upon its feet, began 
soon to dance, caper, leap, and execute gymnastic wonders ; for the 
young gentleman at the head of the treasury must needs apply the 
galvanic fluid once more. That " Bank of the United States," of 
which he had dreamed by the camp-fires of the Revolution, he was 
now in a position to establish. Deaf to the warnings of the prudent 
and the arguments of the wise, he forced it through Congress, and 
sat up all night writing a paper to convince the president that he 
ought to sign the bill. The books were opened. In a day — as fast, 
indeed, as the entries could be made — the shares were all taken, 
and large numbers of people were still eager to subscribe. 

Then arose in the United States just such a mania for speculation 
as France experienced when the gambler Law, and the roue Re- 
gent, put their heads together in 1717. Every scrap of paper issued 
by the United States or bearing its sanction, whether debt or shares, 
acquired a fictitious value. " What do you think of this scrippo- 
mania?" asks Jefferson of a fr.end in August, 1791. "Ships are 
lying idle at the wharves, buildings are stopped, capitals are with- 
drawn from commerce, manufactures, arts and agriculture, to be 
employed in gambling ; and the tide of public prosperity, almost 
unparalleled in any country, is arrested in its course, and suppressed 
by the rage of getting rich in a day. No mortal can tell when this 
will stop J for the spirit of gaming, when once it has seized a 



THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 397 

subject, is incurable. The tailor who has made thousands in one 
day, though he has lost them the next, can never again be content 
with the slow and moderate earnings of his needle." Hamilton, 
too, was alarmed at the " extravagant sallies of speculation," which, 
he said, disgusted all sober citizens, and gave " a wild air to every 
thing." Such periods, happily, can never be of long duration : 
under the magic touch of Law, the corpse of French credit kept 
upon its feet eight months, then collapsed, and " a hundred thousand 
persons ruined." The period of inflation in the United States lasted 
about the same time, and was followed by the usual depression, and 
the sudden return of the speculating tailor to his needle. 

We laugh at those periods of collapse when they are past ; but, 
while they are passing, the hurricanes of the West Indies, the 
simooms of Sahara, the earthquakes of the Andes, are not more ter- 
rible. They once threatened to play the same part in the spiritual 
history of America as the " terrible aspects of Nature " did in that 
of Spain, where, as Mr. Buckle remarks, famines, epidemics, and 
earthquakes kept the human mind in a bondage of terror, and ren- 
dered it the easy prey of the priest. 



CHAPTER XLIV. 

JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WORK. 

The secretary of state, meanwhile, was grappling with the 
weighty, nnconspicuous duties of his place. No one knew, at first, 
what those duties were, or were not. For a while he was postmaster- 
general ; and we find him inviting Colonel Pickering to dinner to 
confer upon a dashing scheme of sending the mail over the country 
at the furious pace of one hundred miles a day. His idea was to 
employ the public coaches for the service ; but, as they only travelled 
by day, he wished to "hand the mail along through the night, till it 
may fall in with another stage the next day." He was commis- 
sioner of patents as well; and, in that capacity, saw what "a. 
spring " was given to invention by the patent-law. Happy were 
the inventors to find so appreciative an examiner of their devices ! 
Oddly enough, too, it was to him the House referred a pretended 
discovery of one Isaacs for converting sea water into fresh. Pie 
gave a quietus to the claim of the enterprising Isaacs by inviting 
him to try his hand upon a few gallons of salt water in the presence 
of Rittenhouse, Wistar, Hutchinson, and himself, all members of 
the Philosophical )Society. The process proved to be a mere distil- 
lation (known and practised for many years), veiled by a little hocus- 
pocus of Mr. Isaac's own contriving. He reported against the claim, 
and advised that a short account of the best way of extemporizing 
a still on board ship be printed on the back of all ships' clearances, 
with an invitation to forward results of such attempts to the secre- 
tary of state. 

The question otf establishing a mint was referred by a lazy House 
of Representatives to the secretary of state. Shall we send abroad 
to get our coins made, or manufacture them at home ? At home, 
said Mr. Jefferson, f Coinage is peculiarly an attribute of sovereign- 



JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WOEK. 399 

ty. . . . To transfer its exercise into another country, is to submit 
it to another sovereign." So the mint was established at Philadel- 
phia, workmen were invited from abroad, and a quantity of copper 
ordered from Europe to be made into American cents. 

Some questions, which would now be answered by the Supreme 
Court, were referred to him for an opinion. One was this : If the 
president nominates an ambassador, has the senate a right to change 
the grade of the nominee to plenipotentiarj'' ? It has not, was the 
opinion given. Even the validity of a grant of land was referred 
to him. Man}' a day of arduous toil, and many an hour of earnest 
consultation, were devoted by Jefferson in the summer of 1790 to a 
report, called for by. the House, of a plan of establishing uniformity 
in coinage, weights, and measures ; a subject familiar to his mind 
for many years. In this most elaborate and able paper, packed 
close with curious knowledge, and illumined with happy suggestions, 
he made one more attempt to inti'oduce the decimal system. If his 
advice had been followed, school-boys to-day might be "saying" 
their tables in this fashion: "Ten points one line; ten lines one 
inch ; ten inches one foot ; ten feet one decad ; ten decads one rood; 
ten roods one furlong; ten furlongs one mile." But this was too 
audacious for Congress to accept. The only decimal table adopted 
was the one relating to the new Federal money. But the people 
long clung to the familiar difficulties of pounds, shillings, and pence, 
aggravated by the intricacies of the different State currencies. After 
the lapse of eighty-two years, — so inveterate is habit — we are not 
yet universally submissive to the easy yoke of the decimal currency. 
"Dime" comes slowly into use; the words "sixpence" and "shil- 
ling " linger after the coins are gone ; and the popular propensity 
is to call an eagle a " ten-dollar piece." 

In addition to these domestic duties, it devolved upon the secre- 
tary of state to superintend the laying out of the District of Co- 
lumbia, and the planning of the public edifices in the dense forest 
that covered the site of Washington. Hence, perhaps, the general 
resemblance of that city to ancient Williamsburg in Virginia, where 
the secretary of state attended college, studied law, played the violin, 
and loved Belinda. If Jefferson could have forgotten the spacious, 
pleasant old town, there was "dear Page" at his side, and plenty of 
other graduates of William and Mary, to remind him of it. 

In the autumn of 1790 the government packed up its traps, and 



400 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

removed from New York to Philadelphia. New-Yorkers took the 
loss good-humoredly enough, if we may judge from the newspapers. 
"And so Congress is going to Philadelphia," said one. "Well, 
then there is an end of every thing: no more pavement; no more 
improvements of any kind." And the editor wound up a long, 
jocular article by telling the story of Charles II. and the Lord 
Mayor of London. "What did the king say?" asked his Lordship 
of a deputation of aldermen just returned from court. "He says, 
if we don't give him more mone}', he'll remove his court to Wind- 
sor." "Is that all?" cried the Mayor. "I thought his Majesty 
said he'd take the Thames away." New York, too, has found its 
Thames sufficient. 

In November, then, of 1790, the secretary of state, after a 
delightful month at Monticello, was established in Philadelphia, 
living in " four rooms " of a spacious lodging-house on the pleasant 
outskirts of the city, not far from where Dr. Franklin flew his 
immortal kite. Near by, the secretary had a stable and coach-house 
with stalls for six horses, four of which were occupied; so that 
Madison, Monroe, and himself could enjoy a canter together along 
the delicious banks of the Schuylkill. It was oftener a walk than 
a ride. Once it was a " wade." " What say you," he writes to 
Madison, during a rainy week in April, 1791, "to taking a wade 
into the country at noon ? It will be pleasant above head at least, 
and the party will finish by dining here." He was raised to the 
dignity of grandfather in February, 1791. " Your last two letters," 
he writes to his daugliter, " gave me the greatest pleasure of any I 
ever received from you. The one announced that you were become 
a notable housewife ; the other, a mother. The last is undoubtedly 
the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness, as the first is 
its daily aliment." Monticello waited for him to name the baby. 
"Anne" was his choice, because it was a name frequent in both 
families. 

He. had also the honor, at this time, of being a kind of martyr to 
his principles. It was Jefferson who had taken the lead in destroy- 
ing the ancient system of primogeniture and entail in Virginia; and 
one of the first great heirs who suffered by the reform was his own 
son-in-law, Randolph. The father of the young husband, a brisk 
and social old gentleman of the old school, gave alarming symptoms 
of a second marriage. A girl in her teens was the object of his 



JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WORK. 401 

choice, upon whom he proposed to make a settletlient so lavish as to 
•greatly abridge the inheritance of the young couple, as well as to 
throw a great part of the charge of their immediate settlement upon 
Mr. Jefferson. The letter which he wrote to his daughter on this 
occasion has been a thousand times admired, and will be admired 
again as often as it is read by a person in whose disposition there is 
any thing of magnanimity or tenderness. He told her that Colonel 
Randolph's marriage was a thing to have been expected ; for, as he 
was a man whose amusements depended upon society, he could not 
live alone. The settlement upon the old man's bride might be 
neither prudent nor just, but he hoped it would not lessen their 
affection for him. 

" If the lady," he continued, " has any thing difficult in her 
disposition, avoid what is rough, and attach her good qualities to 
you. Consider what are otherwise as a bad stop in your harpsi- 
chord, and do not touch on it, but make yourself happy with the 
good ones. Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed, 
according to what he is good for ; for none of Us, — no not one, — is 
perfect ; and, were we to love none who had imperfections, this world 
would be a desert for our love. All we can do is to make the best 
of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out 
of the way of what is bad; but no more think of rejecting them 
for it, than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or 
two. Your situation will require peculiar attentions and respects 
to both parties. Let no proof be too much for either your patience 
or acquiescence. Be you, my dear, the link of love, union, and 
peace for the whole family. The world will give you the more 
credit for it in proportion to the difficult}'- of the task, and your own 
happiness will be the greater as you perceive that you promote that 
of others. Former acquaintance and equality of age will render it 
the easier for you to cultivate and gain the love of the lady. The 
mother, too, becomes a very necessary object of attentions." 

The marriage took place, and the settlements upon the bride were 
made. The young couple, in consequence, were much more cur- 
tailed in their resources than any one bad expected. But the 
daughter of Jefferson remained, for thirty-five years, " the link of 
love, union, and peace for the whole family ; " one member of which, 
John Randolph of Eoanoke, estranged as he was from her father, 
toasted her as " the noblest woman in Virginia." 

26 



CHAPTER XLV. 

NEGOTIATIONS "WITH ENGLAND AFTER THE REVOLUTION". 

President Washington's chief difficulties, after the public debt 
had been provided for, arose from the relations of the young repub- 
lic with foreign powers. To weakness every thing is difficult. The 
necessity of keeping the peace was so manifest and so urgent, that 
the government could not meet the representatives of an unfriendly 
power on equal terms. The United States then signified merely a 
thin line of settlements along the Atlantic coast, open on the side of 
the ocean to a hostile fleet, and on the western boundary to the 
Indian tribes; Spain holding New Orleans, and Great Britain Can- 
ada. There was no army, no navy, no surplus revenue ; and the 
country was but just recovering from the exhaustion and ravage of 
an eight-years' war. Happily, for one reason or another, from 
policy or sentiment, all Christendom wished well to the infant 
nation, excepting alone the king and ruling class of Great Britain. 
These could not forgive America the wrongs they had done her. 
There was, also, a small, but influential class in the United States, 
whose ancient fondness for the land of their ancestors had survived 
the war, and affected their judgment concerning questions in dispute 
between the two countries. 

When General Washington came to the presidency in 1789, six 
years had elapsed since the peace. In the treaty of 1783, Great 
Britain had agreed to evacuate, without needless delay, every forti- 
fied place within the boundaries of the United States ; and yet 
British garrisons still held seven American posts of little use to her, 
but of vital importance both to the honor and the safety of this 
country, — posts the retention of which was a menace as well as an 
injury ; for they kept open the great natural highways from Canada 
into the United States. The posts were Detroit, Mackinaw, 

402 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 403' 

Oswego, OgdensDurg, Niagara, and two commanding places on 
Lake Cliamplain, called then Iron Point and Dutchman's Point. 
Independence was not complete while the English flag flew above 
these posts ; nor were the frontiers safe. What could the Indians 
think of it? An Indian head is a small, poor thing, .which cannot 
hold many ideas at a time. The Indians could see that familiar flag, 
and could recognize those red-coated soldiers as servants of the 
power to which they had been submissive for thirty years ; but wliat 
could they know of President Washington and his government, dis- 
tant a month's journey ? 

The fur-trade, too, which would have been important to an infant 
nation obliged to buy so much in Europe, was necessarily in the 
hands of men having access to those posts. John Jacob Astor was 
already a furrier in New York, doing business in 1790 at No. 40, 
Little Dock Street ; but while the English held the posts, he could 
only tramp the eastern half of the State of New York, with his pack 
of gewgaws and paint upon his back, and gather fui-s from the 
friendly part of the Six Nations. A nice little business he had, it is 
true, but not sufficient to encourage him to tliink of building an 
Astor House or founding an Astor Library. Captain Cooper (father 
of Peter Cooper), who had a small hat-factory in the same street, 
and bought many a beaver-skin of this thriving furrier, would have 
had them cheaper if his neighbor could have ranged free over the 
western country. Another grievance was this : In evacuating New 
York, the British commander, in open disregard of the treaty, liad 
jjermitted a large number of slaves to find passage in the fleet; three 
thousand of whom had been received on board under the eyes of the 
American commissioners appointed to prevent it, in spite of their 
remonstrance, and in consequence of an avowed order of tlie general 
in command. 

To these substantial wrongs was added a neglect, an indifference, a 
silence, that looked like sj'stematic discourtesy. Congress sent Mr. 
Adams to London, in 1785, to represent the new member of tlie 
family of nations near the court of one of tlie oldest. No English 
minister was sent to America till six years after. Mr. Adams, 
though he was received civilly enough, was kept haunting ante-cham- 
bers for three months before he began to get any certaint}'' as to the 
reason why the posts were retained. When the king, in 1775, made 
war upon the colonies, suddenly suspending commercial intercourse, 



404 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

America owed British merchants vast suras. Tlie long-credit sys- 
tem had been so encouraged by the merchants, that the colonies 
were, perhaps, a year behindhand in their payments. The war 
lasted nearly eight years, and left the country exhausted and impov- 
erished, — with an alarming public debt to provide for, with a host 
of needy soldiers to appease, with the means of recuperation 
destroyed, with the commerce of the West Indies closed to them, 
and all the old commerce gone into other hands. But the treaty of 
peace had not been signed before the British creditors began to 
clamor for their debts, with interest! Eight years' interest added 
to the principal ! Interest for the long period when every port was 
blockaded, and the productive industry of the country suspended by 
the power which owed protection to both ! Not Grotius, nor Vattel, 
no, nor Puftendorf, nor all these learned pundits in accord, were ever 
able to convince New England merchants or Virginia planters that 
this was right. Every State passed laws protecting its citizens 
against ruinous suits to recover these debts. There was a general 
intention to pay the ancient principal ; but the war interest no 
Whig could feel to be just. 

Mr. Adams had at length the satisfaction of sitting face to face 
with Mr. Pitt, the heaven-born minister, aged twenty-six, still in 
the splendid dawn of his wonderful career. " What are the princi- 
pal points to be discussed between us?" Mr. Pitt inquired. The 
American minister enumerated them. The posts, the negroes, and 
a treaty of commerce, were the chief. With regard to the negroes, 
Mr. Pitt was candid and explicit. Carrying them off, he said, was 
so clearly against the treaty, that, if Mr. Adams could produce the 
requisite proof of their number and value, the British government 
" must take measures to satisfy that demand." This was a good 
beginning. Another point, relating to certain captures of American 
vessels after the armistice of 1783, Mr. Pitt thought was '' clear," 
and could be " easily settled." But those were all the concessions 
the English minister was disposed to make. " As to the posts," 
said he, " that is a point connected with some others, that, I think, 
must be settled at the same time." We can imagine the eager 
interest with which Mr. Adams asked what those points were. 
" The debts," was Mr. Pitt's reply : " several of the States have 
interfered against the treaty, and by acts of their legislatures have 
interposed impediments to the recovery of debts, against which there 
are great complaints in this country." 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 405 

The secret was out. The creditors, as Mr. Pitt remarked, were 
clamorous. In London they formed themselves into a society for the 
purpose of urging on the government to press their claims; and this 
society was so powerful, that no administration could willingly disre- 
gard its wishes. 

The conversation continued. No American jurj^, Mr. Adams said, 
would ever award any interest for the time of the war. That would 
surj^rise people in England, ]\lj:. Pitt observed; for warsjiever inter- 
rupted the interest or principal of debts ; a*nd he could see no differ- 
ence between this war and an\'' other, and English lawj'ers made 
none. This was too much for Mr. Adams. '' I begged his p.irdon 
here," he reports, ''and said that American lawyers made a wide 
difference: th&y contended that the late war was a total dissolution 
of all laws and government, and consequently of all contracts made 
under those laws." This being the case, he thought the two gov- 
ernments should come to an understanding, so that the same rule of 
law might be observed on both sides. Mr. Pitt seemed to think 
this not unreasonable ; but he frankly owned that the administration 
" would not dare to make the proposal, without previously feeling 
out the dispositions of the persons chiefly interested." 

Erom this subject they turned to the desired treaty of commerce, 
so necessary to enable America to pay these very debts. It was 
unaccountable, Mr. Adams said, that Great Britain should sacrifice 
the general interest of the nation to the private interest of a few 
individuals interested in the whale-fishery and ship-building, so far 
as to refuse to take American oil and ships in payment of the debts. 
Mr. Adams became eloquent on this point. " The fat of the sperma- 
ceti whale," he said, " gives the clearest and most beautiful flame of 
any substance known in nature ; and we are all surprised that you 
prefer darkness, and consequent robberies, burglaries, and murders, 
in j'^our streets, to the receiving, as a remittance, our spermaceti oil. 
The lamps around Grosvenor Square " (where Mr. Adams lived) '• I 
know, and in Downing Street " (where this conversation occurred), 
"I suppose, are dim by midnight, and extinguished by two o'clock;, 
whereas our oil would burn bright till nine o'clock, and chase away 
before the watchmen all the villains, and save you the trouble and 
danger of introducing a new police into the city." 

The whole conversation was sprightly and good-tempered. Mr. 
Pitt sent a thrill of triumphant joy through the frame of Mr. 



40G LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON". 

Adams by saying, as the conference closed, that he was in favor of 
taking advantage of the recess to mature a plan for settling the 
differences. The American minister declared he was rejoiced to 
hear it. He would be ready at all times to attend whenever expla- 
nation was wanted. Meanwhile, he was anxious about the posts: he 
would like an answer on that point, so vital to the peace and safety, 
as well as to the business of his country. "I am in dut}^ bound," 
said he, "tQ insist on their evacuaticjn." To which the Avary Pitt 
replied, that that point was connected with others, and he should 
be for settling all these together. 

And that was all the satisfaction Mr. Adams received during ^is 
three years' residence in England. No summons from the Ministry 
came, no explanation was asked, no apology offered. King, Parlia- 
ment, and people were against him, against America, against 
receiving oil from Nantucket, or ships from Maine; against remit- 
ting the war interest; against giving up the posts till the debts 
were paid ; against affording a young nation the slightest chance of 
getting on in the world. In these circumstances, what could the 
Ministry do but do nothing? If Mr. Adams sought an interview, 
he never advanced a step beyond the point where Mr. Pitt and 
himself had left the controversy. Give up the posts, said Mr. 
Adams. P(^y the dehts, replied the English minister. What, cried 
Adams, pay the debts ? No government was ever before asked to 
pay the private debts of its subjects. The treaty only stipulated 
that no lawful impediment should be put in the way of the recovery 
of the 'debts. " But," said the minister, " if lawful impediments 
have been thrown in the way" — Finally, the king himself when 
Mr. Adams, weary of hopeless waiting, went to take formal leave, 
said bluntly, " Mr. Adams, you may with great truth assure the 
United States, that, whenever they shall fulfil the treaty on their 
part, I, on my part, will fulfil it in all its particulars." 

Exasperating as all this was to the old Adam in human nature, 
Congress were patient under it. They referred the whole subject, 
as disclosed in Mr. Adams's letters, to John Ja}', for his opinion. 
Mr. Jay, in an elaborate paper, which aimed -to present the wh'ole 
matter from the beginning, came to this strange conclusion : We 
are wrong, and England is right ! The fourth article of the treaty 
of peace was in these words: "It is agreed that the creditors on 
either side shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recoveiy of 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 407 

the full value, in sterling money, of all the bona fide debts hereto- 
fore contracted." The simple question was, according to Mr. Jay, 
"Have British creditors met with lawful impediments to the 
recovery of their American debts?" To this question, he said, but 
one answer could be given : They have ; every State had passed 
laws impeding, delaying, or forbidding the collection of the debts. 
This infraction, Mr. Jay thought, justified Great Britain in holding 
the posts ; " nor would Britain be to blame in continuing to hold 
them, until America shall cease to impede her enjojang every essen- 
tial right secured to her and her peoj^le and adherents by the 
treaty." 

Having reached this conclusion, he advised Congress, 1, To 
recommend the States to repeal the impeding laws ; 2, To instruct 
Mr. Adams " candidly to admit that the fourth and sixth articles of 
the treaty had been violated in America;" and to say that the 
United States were taking efficacious measures for removing all 
cause of complaint. Congress accepted Mr. Jay's conclusions. 
They gave the required advice to the States, and gave it with all 
the requisite tact and dignity. A majority of the State legisla- 
tures repealed the laws; others were considering the subject, when! 
the Constitution of 1787 removed the difficulty by rendering the* 
general government unquestionably supreme in all matters of \ 
foreign concern. 

But this sublime diplomacy did not touch the heart of the British 
creditor, nor change the policy of the government, nor assuage the 
animosity of the ruling class. As a rule, Americans who were able 
to pay their British debts paid them ; but a considerable number, 
dead or ruined by the war, gave no sign. . America remained an 
odious name in England, Mr. Adams informs ^^s. Members of 
Parliament, he wrote, had been so long badgered and tormented on 
the subject, that they detested to hear the name mentioned, and th$ 
humor of the nation seemed to be neither to speak nor think of 
America. Four millions sterling had already been appropriated by 
Parliament to compensate banished Tories and ruined adherents. 
The pension-list had been lengthened by a long catalogue of Ameri- 
can placemen ; and still the lobbies and ante-chambers were haunted 
by a clamorous multitude of hungry claimants. We can hardly 
{ wonder, that when at length Mr. Adams, in weariness and despair, 
V.was preparing to leave, he should have been treated "with that dry, 



408 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 

decency and cold civility which appears to liave been the premedi- 
tated plan from the beginning." 

Two years passed. The new government came into existence, 
with General Washington at its head. Great Britain still held the 
posts, retained the fur-trade, ruled the Indians, shut the ports of the 
West Indies, and sent no minister to Philadelphia. The president, 
after an attentive perusal of the papers and a survey of the situa- 
tion, privately commissioned Gouverneur Morris, in October, 1789, 
to cross the channel, and "converse with his Britannic majesty's 
ministers" on the points in controversy, and "ascertain their 
views," and endeavor to discover whether negotiations could be 
re-opened with any fair prospect of a termination satisfactorj'- to the 
United States. 

It is a trial to the temper of an American citizen to read the 
record of Mr. Morris's mission. The policy of "dry decency and 
cold civility" was carried to an extreme whicli was sometimes too 
much for the warm temper of tlie American commissioner, who gave 
Mr. Pitt some pretty sharp retorts. On one occasion, after pressing 
the English minister hard for some basis of a negotiation, he got a 
glimpse of daylight. 

MoRKis. If I understand you, Mr. Pitt, you wish to make a 
new treaty, instead of complying with the old one. 

Pitt. That is, in some sort, my idea. 

MoKRis. I do not see what better can be done than to perform 
the old one. As to the compensation for negroes taken away, it is 
too trifling an object for 3'ou to dispute, so that nothing remains but 
the posts. I suppose, therefore, that you wish to retain those posts. 

Pitt. IMiy, 2^erhaj)s we may. 

Morris. They are not worth the keeping ; for it must cost you a 
great deal of monej'', and produce no benefit. The only reason you 
can have to desire them is to secure the fur-trade ; and that will 
centre in this country, let who will carry it on in America. 

Pitt. If you consider these posts as a trivial object, there is the 
less reason for requiring them. 

Morris. Pardon me, sir, I only state the retaining them as use- 
less to you. . . . Our national honor is interested. You hold them 
with the avowed intention of forcing us to comply with such con- 
ditions as you may impose. 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 409 

Pitt. Wliy, sir, as to the consideration of national honor, we 
may retort the observation, and say, our honor is concerned in your 
delay of performance of the treaty'; 

MoiiRis. No, sir: your natural and proper course was to comply 
fully on your part, and if then we had refused compliance, you 
might rightfully have issued letters of marque and reprisal to such 
of your subjects as were injured by bur refusal. But the conduct 
you have pursued, naturally excites resentment in every American 
bosom. We do not think it wortli while to go to war with you for 
these posts ; but we know our rights, and will avail ourselves of them 
when time and circumstances may suit. 

Pitt. Have you powers to treat? 

Morris. I have not. ' We cannot appoint any person as minister, 
you so much neglected the former appointment. 

Pitt. Will you appoint a minister if we do ? 

Morris. I can almost promise we shall, but am not authorized to 
give any positive assurance. 

Pitt. Then the question is, How shall we communicate on this 
subject? 

Morris. Perhaps it would be expedient for you to appoint a 
minister, and delay his departure till we have made a similar 
appointment. 

Pitt. W^e could communicate to the president our intention to 
appoint. 

Morris. Your communication might encounter some little diffi- 
culty, because the president cannot properly hear any thing from the 
British consuls, these being characters unacknowledged in America. 

Pitt (^firing up a little). I should suppose, Mr. Morris, that 
attention might as well be paid to what they say, as that the Duke 
of Leeds and myself should hold the present conversation with you. , 

Morris. By no means, sir. I should never have thought of 
asking a conference with His Grace, if I had not possessed a letter 
from the president of the United States. 

Pitt. We, in like manner, could write a letter to one of our 
consuls. 

Morris. Yes, sir ; and the letter would be attended to, but not the 
consul, who is in no respect different from any other British subject. 

Pitt. Etiquette ought not to be pushed so far as to injure busi- 
nesS; and keep the countries asunder. 



410 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Morris. The rulers of America have too much understanding to 
care for etiquette ; but I beg you to recollect, that you have hitherto 
kept us at a distance, instead of Snaking advances. The president 
has gone quite as far as you had any reason to expect, in writing 
the letter I have just mentioned ; and, from what has passed in con- 
sequence of it, we cannot but consider you as wishing to avoid an 
intercourse. 

Pitt. I hope j-ou will endeavor to remove such an idea. I assure 
you, we are disposed to cultivate a connection. 

Morris. Any communications which His Grace of Leeds may 
make shall be duly transmitted; but I do not like to write mere 
conversations. Our disposition towards a good understanding is evi- 
denced, not only by the president's letter, but by the decision of a 
majority of the House of Representatives against laying extraordi- 
nary restrictions on British vessels in American ports. 

Pitt. Instead of restrictions, you ought to give us particular 
privileges, in return for those which you enjoy here. 

Morris. I assure you I know of no particular privileges which 
we enjoy here, except that of being impressed, which, of all others, 
is the one we least wish to partake of. 

Duke of Lekds (Jaugking). You are at least treated in that 
respect as " the most favored nation," seeing that you are treated 
like ourselves. 

Pitt (serioushj). We have certainly evidenced good-will towards 
you by what we have done respecting your commerce. 

Morris. Your regulations were dictated by a view to your own 
interest; and therefore, as we feel no favor, we owe no obligation. 

Here the conversation ended. Mr. Pitt said that the Duke of 
Xeeds and himself would consult together, and give Mr. Morris the 
result of their deliberations. Doubtless they meant to do so; and, 
if the decision had rested with the three gentlemen present on this 
occasion, the posts would have been speedily surrendered, and a 
reasonable treaty of commerce concluded. But there was a royal 
Dunderhead in the way, the sum-total of whose American policy 
was this: "My American Tories stood by me: I will stand by 
them. Annul the confiscations, make good the lost debts, and then 
we'll talk about the posts." There was, also, an ignorant mer- 
cantile and manufacturing class, wlio had not yet begun to study 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 411 

their Adam Smith, and who cherished the pride that goes with 
ignorance, whether its possessor is an Indian chief or a British cot- 
ton-spinner. 

The cons^ersation given above occurred May 21, 1790. May 
ended, June began and ended, July and August passed, September 
was gliding by, and yet Gouverneur Morris received not a line, not a 
word, from the ministry. Had they forgotten his existence ? He 
had extensive affairs in Holland that demanded his presence; and 
yet he waited, — waited solely for the promised communication. 
Meanwhile, the nocturnal exploits of the press-gang in British sea- 
ports added new outrage to the old grievances. Morris, after wait- 
ing four months, was compelled to ask attention to his mission. He 
obtained "dry decency and cold civility" in return for his patient 
waiting ; but he could neA'er wring a satisfactory word from the 
ministers of a king, who, he said, " hated the very name of America." 
The president, acting upon Jefferson's advice, terminated his mis- 
sion, and sent him a thousand dollars to defray the expenses of his 
six months' residence in London. The outspoken founder of " Mor- 
risania" returned polite acknowledgments of the president's con- 
sideration, and remarked to the secretary of state, that his detention 
in London had cost him four hundred and eighty-nine pounds six 
shillings and sixpence. 

Such were the relations between the United States and Great 
Britain in 1790, when Jefferson and Hamilton began to discuss 
national affairs across the president's mahogany. And still the 
jjenchant of the secretary of the treasury was for Great Britain. 
Washington's was not : he had been cured of it years before., Jef- 
ferson's was not, of course. Hamilton had concurred with Mr. Jay 
and Mr. Adams in the opinion, that there had been violations of the 
treaty on both sides, and that, as America began it, England had 
not been to blame for retaining the posts. Penchant is a great 
matter. I am sure that Colonel Hamilton was most warmly 
attached, nay, wholly devoted to the country which he served; but 
this leaning toward Great Britain, and a certain British aversion to 
France, could not but have its effect upon his judgment. 

In September, 1790, while Gouverneur Morris was still waiting in 
London, occurred one of those diplomatic crises, once so frequent, 
which threatened war between Great Britain and Spain, with strong 
probability of involving half of Europe in the strife. The president, 



412 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

from many indications, concluded, that, in case the war brolce out, 
Mr. Pitt would strike at once, in his father's style, for Kew Orleans, 
and all the Spanish territory in that region ; floating troops from 
Detroit down our lakes and rivers to meet a British armament from 
the sea. Two momentous questions arose in the president's mind, 
which he proposed to Jefferson and Hamilton, requesting answers in 
writing: 1, Suppose Lord Dorchester, the governor of Canada, 
should ask permission to send troops through the territories of the 
United States, what answer shall we give ? 2, Suj^pose he should 
do it without leave ("the most prohabl* proceeding"), what shall 
we do about it ? The president was profoundly impressed with the 
magnitude of the danger to a young nation, exhausted with a long 
war, deep in debt, without army or navy, of having, as he said, "so 
formidable and enterprising a people as the British on both our 
flanks and rear, with their navy in front." 

Mr. Jefferson's reply was short and explicit. E-ather than have 
New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi a British possession, 
he thought, we should join in the melee of nations, and fight. But 
this w"as the last thing to do, not the first ; and not to be done so 
long as any other decent expedient remained untried. If permission 
to pass troops should be asked' and refused, and still they should pass, 
we must instantly declare war ; since V one insult pocketed soon pro- 
duces another."\ Let us, then, begin by trying a middle course. 
Avoid giving an answer. Then, if they march, we can acgept an 
apology, or make it a "handle of quarrel hereafter," according to cir- 
cumstances. If they sliould march without asking leave, we should 
resent, or forgive, or disregard it, just as we might find it most con- 
ducive to our main object. 

Mr. Jefferson was ready with his brief opinion the day after the 
president asked for it. Hamilton took nineteen days, and sent in a 
treatise. Being out of his element, and beyond his depth, he floun- 
dered in a distressing manner, clutching at Puffendorf, Grotius, Vat- 
tel, and Barbeyrac. He wandered so far as to introduce a discourse 
upon his favorite topic of the United States owing no " romantic 
gratitude " to France, and no gratitude at all to Spain. The tone 
and spirit of this long essay are such- as to justify much of the 
warmth of opposition which Hamilton's political system excited. It 
is evident that the insolence of the British government, and the out- 
rage of holding the posts, had excited in his mind, no indignation ; 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 413 

and tliat he was one of those, who, to use his own language, "would 
prefer an intimate connection between the United States and Great 
Britain as most conducive to our security and advantage.'^ He 
dwelt upon the obvious unfitness of the country to enter into the 
war, and the little likelihood there was of our accomplisliing our 
object if we did. His conclusions were, that, if Lord Dorchester 
should ask permission, it would be best to grant it ; if he should 
march without permission, but commit no offence, we should remon- 
strate ; but, if he should force a passage past a fortification, we must 
declare war. 

Happily the European war-cloud blew over. In America the west- 
ern sky was overcast, and General St. Clair was preparing the ex- 
pedition against the hostile Indians which was to terminate in the 
surprise of the white army, and the massacre of six hundred troops. 
Jefferson and Hamilton differed again ; for Jefferson was opposed to 
the expedition. He hoped, indeed, that General St. Clair would 
give the Indians *' a thorough drubbing," since the affair had come 
to that; but he thought that "the most economical, as well as most 
humane, conduct toward them is to bribe them into peace, and retain 
them in peace by eternal bribes." A hundred years of -present-giv- 
ing, he said, would not cost as much as this single expedition ; and 
then follows a sentence which reveals the heat of many a cabinet 
battle, as the lava on Vesuvius betrays past eruption : " The least 
rag of Indian depredation will be an excuse to raise troops for those 
who love to have troops and for those who tliink that a public debt 
is a public blessing." This to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, April, 
1791. 

Upon another practical question, the secretary of the treasury dif- 
fered from the secretary of state. Hamilton opposed, Jefferson 
favored, a system of retaliating the restrictions imposed by Great 
Britain upon American commerce. With regard to commercial 
intercourse with foreign nations, the only system Jefferson ever 
heartily approved was this : " Perfect and universal free-trade, as one 
of the natural rights of man and as the only sound policy. We may 
style that his first choice. His second was this : Free-trade with 
I any nation which will reciprocate. But, as no nation was yet pre- 
tpared for so advanced a measure, he was in favor of reciprocating 
privileges conceded by a foreign power, and retaliating restrictions. 
V Free trade and navigation," he thought, " are not to be given, in 



414 ' LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 

exchange for restrictions and vexations, nor are they likely to pro- 
duce a relaxation of them." 

<ireat Britain imposed such restrictions upon American commerce 
as seem, at present, too preposterous for belief. From her West 
India Islands American vessels were utterly excluded ; and onlj^ such 
American products were admitted as could not be dispensed with, — 
grain, horses, live animals used for food, timber, tar, and turpentine. 
But neither an American vessel nor American products of any kind 
whatever were admitted into one British possession which could do 
without them; not into Newfoundlaml, Canada, or India. From 
Great Britain itself, whale-oil, salt fish, salt provisions, were ex- 
cluded, and grain only admitted when the people must have it or 
go hungry. Jefferson proposed to meet all this by " counter prohi- 
bitions, duties, and regulations," and at the same time go to the 
uttermost in responding to the more liberal policy of France. 

Hamilton, ever desirous of a cordial alliance with Great Britain, 
favored an opposite policy ; and Jefferson thought it was his influ- 
ence which finally held back Congress from retaliating restriction by 
restriction. In the cabinet, Hamilton opposed the retaliation sys- 
tem "violently," and offered one argument which the placable Jeffer- 
son owned was cogent. It was of more importance, Hamilton said, 
for us to have the posts than an open commerce, because nothing 
but the possession of the posts would free us from the expense of the 
Indian wars; and therefore, while we were treating for the posts, it 
would be folly to irritate the English by restricting their commerce. 
The Englisli government would say, " These people mean war, let 
us therefore hold what we have in our hands." Struck with this 
argument, Jefferson replied, " If there is a hope of obtaining the 
posts, I agree it would be imprudent to risk that hope by a commer- 
cial retaliation." He agreed to delay recommending his scheme to 
Congress till the next session. 

For, when this conversation occurred, negotiations had been 
recommenced. In August, 1791, George Hammond, the first British! 
plenipotentiary who ever made his bow to a president of the United' 
States, reached Philadelphia ; and, in the course of the following 
winter, he was in correspondence with the secretary of state upon 
the vexed questions. They were old Paris acquaintances, and both 
were truly desirous of adjusting the differences on a basis of justice. 
The despatch of Mr. Jefferson of May 29, 1792, in which he argues 



NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 415 

the American case, is the longest and the ablest of his official papers. 
There is good reason to believe that it convinced Mr. Hammond ; 
and we know that a large number of JeiFerson's political opponents 
owned, that, whatever errors he may have committed in his public 
life, he was a great man when he argued the cause of h'is country 
against the honest misconceptions of the British minister. "He is 
only fit for a secretary of state," they would say, when his name was 
mentioned in connection with places more eminent. In this paper 
he proved by original documents, that " the treaty of 1783 was vio- 
lated in England before it was known in America, and in America 
as soon as known, and that, too, in points so essential, as that, with- 
out them, it never would have been concluded." He also showed, 
by an array of documentary evidence, that " the recovery of the debts 
was obstructed validly in none of our States, invalidly only in a 
few, and that not till after the infractions committed on tlie other 
side." This despatch is perhaps unsurpassed among the dijjlomatic 
documents of recent times for the thoroughness with which the work 
undertaken was performed. Its tranquil, dispassionate tone, and its 
freedom from every thing that could irritate the self-love of the 
English government or the English people, are as remarkable as the 
perfect frankness and fulness with which the rights of his country 
are stated. 

Jefferson invited Mr. Hammond to a " solo dinner " on the sub- 
ject, a few days after the delivery of this despatch, when they con- 
versed on the points at issue in the most open and friendly manner. 
The British minister admitted that the idea of England having 
committed the first infraction was a new element in the controversy. 
His court had never heard of it ; and it " gave the case a complexion 
so entirely new and different from what had been contemplated, 
that he should not be justified in taking a single step." He could 
only send the despatch across the ocean, and await further instruc- 
tions. From the whole of this conversation, Jefferson derived the 
impression, that the English government " had entertained no 
thought of ever giving up the posts." Toward the close of the 
interview, Mr. Hammond suggested the idea of neither party having 
fortified posts on the frontier, but trading-posts only ; which, says 
Jefferson, " accorded well with two favorite ideas of mine, of leaving 
commerce free, and never keeping an unnecessary soldier." 

Mr. Jefferson's despatch of two hundred and fifty manuscript 



416 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFEESON. 

pages made its way to Downing Street, but not to the brain or the 
conscience of George III. Nothing came of it. The controversy 
remained open during the whole period of his tenure of office. He 
sent in, at last, his report, recommending commercial retaliation, but 
only to have the scheme defeated, as he always supposed by his col- 
league. 

And we must keep in mind, that while these two gentlemen, 
Hammond and Jefferson, calmly conversed over their wine on these 
subjects, there was an American people whose conversation vipon 
them was the farthest possible from being tranquil. The people 
might not be up in their Puflfendorf, nor was Vattel often seen on 
the family table ; but the St. Clair massacre struck horror to the 
coldest heart, and excited reflections in the dullest head. Every 
one could enter into such cases as that of Hugh Purdie, a native of 
Virginia, impressed in London streets, carried to sea in a man-of- 
war, ordered to be released by the admiralty, put in irons and 
flogged after thoee orders had been received, and set on shore in a 
strange land without the means of subsisting for a day. It took 
fifty 3'^ears to get the hatred out of the hearts of the American peo- 
ple which was engendered, not so much by the war, as by this inso- 
lent persistence in outrage after the war. 



CHAPTER XLVI. 

THE FREXCH REVOLUTION" IX AMERICAN POLITICS. 

Meanwhile the Revolution in France, followed at first with uni- 
versal approval, was becoming an element of discord in the politics 
of the country; and nowhere were the questions involved discussed 
so warmly as in President Washington's cabinet. An accident 
revealed to the public in 1791 Jefferson's complete sj'mpathy with 
the French people, placed him distinctly at the head of the popular 
part}'^, and made him, at length, president of the United States. 

At first, I repeat, all classes in all countries seemed to hail the 
proceedings of the French people as the beginning of a better day 
for France and for man : even kings, nobles, and the other classes 
most obviously interested in the existing system, cherished or 
affected a sentimental approval of the ideas most subversive of it. 
The destruction of the Bastille shook off from the popular party all 
such adherents. " The time of illusions is past," wrote the queen 
of France to Madame de Polignac, " and to-day we pay dear for our 
infatuation and enthusiasm for the American war." But it was not 
from the party assailed that the first protest reached the ear of Chris- 
tendom. It was from a man whose whole public life had been a strug- 
gle against despotic principles, the most eloquent defender America 
ever had in Europe, Edmund Burke. From an J]arly period — as 
soon, indeed, as the king and queen of France had been brought 
face to face with the Revolution in that wild march from Versailles 
to Paris — he had recoiled from it with a horror which only his own 
mighty pen could express. 

In November, 1789, Dr. Richard Price, an honored member of 
Franklin's familiar London circle, published his famous sermon on 
Love of Country, in which he applied the example of France to the 
case of England, maintaining the principle now so familiar, that 

26 417 



418 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

government is, properly, the creature and servant of the people. It 
was in reply to this discourse that Edmund Burke wrote his Reflec- 
tions on the Revolution in France, — four hundred pages of rhap- 
sody and passion, invested with the potent charm of his inthralling 
style. It was a sorry lapse from the Edmund Burke of the Stamp- 
act nights in the House of Commons. The work was so weak in 
argument, of substance so flimsy and transparent, as really to give 
some slight show of probability to the dastardly charge, that his 
motives in writing it were not disinterested. But we ought not to 
doubt that this poor pamphlet was the faithful expression of his 
state of mind at the time. In 1773, during a recess of Parliament, 
he had had a joyous holiday in France, when he saw all that was 
brightest and most bewitching there, in court and saIo7i, in town 
and country-, himself honored as the great orator of the British Par- 
liament. Only the most pleasing recollections of that happy time 
lingered in his memory. 

"It is now," he wi-ote in his Reflections, "sixteen or seventeen 
years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Ver- 
sailles ; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly 
seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the 
horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just 
begun to move in, — glittering like the morning star, full of life and 
splendor and joy. wliat a revolution ! and what a heart must I 
have, to contemplate, without emotion, that elevation and that fall! 
Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of 
enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged 
to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that 
bosom ; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disas- 
ters fall upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of 
honor and of cavaliers. I thouglit ten thousand swords must have 
leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened 
her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophis- 
ters, economists, and calculators has succeeded ; and the glory of 
Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold 
that generous loj-alty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that 
dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept 
alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The 
unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of 
manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone ! It is gone, that 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 419 

sensibility of principle, that chastit}'- of honor, which felt a stain like 
a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocit_y, which 
ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half 
its evil, by losing all its grossness.'*' 

What a Celtic fluency and gorgeousness in these false, false 
words ! In the composition of such a piece, how ner-essary an 
ingredient is that remoteness from" the object depicted which veils 
all of it which is not enchanting! _.i this whole pamphlet, the 
agony and shame and panic-terror of fair France, how small and 
slight they seem compared with the discomfort endured by one 
Austrian woman rudely interrupted in her career of ignoble pleas- 
ures ! Mr. Burlce, too, had known personally many of the French 
nobility; and he had found them " tolerably well-bred," "frank and 
open," "with a good military tone, and reasonably tinctured with 
literature." " As to their behavior to the inferior classes, they 
appeared to me to comport themselves toward them with good- 
nature," and "I could not dis*cover that their agreements with their 
farmers were oppressive." In speaking of the great multitude of 
industrious and frugal persons, whose toil maintained those tolera- 
bly well-bred nobles of a good military tone ; in speaking, I say, of 
THE PEOPLE OF FkAnce, whom king and nobility had had in charge 
for a thousand years, and had permitted 'to remain grossly ignorant 
and squalidly poor, he used expressions surcharged with the most 
insolent and inhuman contempt. The march from Versailles to the 
Tuileries, he said, was like " a procession of American savages 
entering into Onondaga, and leading into hovels hung round with 
scalps their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of 
women as ferocious as themselves ; " and he said, also, that when the 
nobles and priests had been expelled from France, learning itself 
would be " trodden doivn under the hoofs of a swinish multit^ide." 
This hideous expression (which admitted more than the worst 
enemies of nobles and priests had ever charged against them) rang 
through Europe, imbittering every generous heart and maddening 
every excited head. 

Never had pamphlet such success with the class it was written 
to please. George III., of his own motion, settled upon the author, 
whom he had hated for twenty-six years, a pension of twelve 
hundred pounds a year, and soon after a second jjension of twenty- 
five hundred pounds a j^ear. The k;ng had also a number of copies 



420 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

handsomely bound for presents; and wlien he gave one to a favorite, 
he would say, "This is a book which every gentleman ought to 
read." The Emperor of Germany, the Empress Catherine of 
Russia, the royal family of France, and even poor Stanislaus of 
Poland, sent the author some tribute of their sincere gratitude. 
The book had a great run with the public: in England nineteen 
thousand copies were sold in three months, and in France thirteen 
thousand of the French translation. During the first half-year, the 
number of replies which it called forth was thirty-eight. 

Its effect upon the public was wholly and greatly bad, because it 
excited the reader without instructing him. It hardened the Tory's 
heart, and shut his mind to every truth which it most concerned him 
to know; while the humane portion of the people were only 
incensed at the contemptuous tone of the work toward all the most 
pitiable victims of aristocratic misrule, — those who had lapsed 
under it from citizens to populace. Mad world ! For thirty years, 
in various capacities, public and privafe, Edmund Burke had served 
his countrymen on both sides of the ocean with fidelitj'^ and power, 
and got little by it but the opportunity to serve them better. He 
writes this false and foolish pamphlet, and behold him rich, and 
the world at his feet! The people gave him little but honor, and the 
kings rewarded him with all but that. 

Among the friends of Mr, Burke, many may have been more 
grieved at his new departure, but none was more astonished, than 
Thomas Paine, then at Paris, pushing into publicity his own self- 
supporting bridge. He appears to have originated that kind of 
structure, now so common. Arriving in England, a year or two 
before, on the same errand, he had been Mr. Burke's guest for 
several weeks, during which they had made together the tour of the 
iron foundries of Yorkshire, and visited together some of Mr. 
Burke's political allies on the liberal side. "I am just going to 
dine with the Duke of Portland," writes Burke to Wilkes in 
Augixst, 1788, " in companj^ with the great American, Paine, whom 
I take with me " From Paris, Paine wrote occasionally to the great 
"Whig orator; one letter, indeed, after Mr. Burke must have begun 
the composition of his work, in which Paine gave him an account, 
as he says, "how prosperously matters were going on in France;" 
not doubting that he was pouring his information into a sympa- 
thetic ear. Like most writers who make sentences that stick in the 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 421 

general memory, and long remain part of the common f?peecli of 
men, Thomas Paine composed very slowly and with great toil^ One 
of his friends reports that the author of Common Sense knew by 
heart all that he had ever written, — so thoroughly had he wrought 
each sentence and each phrase. Nevertheless, in March, 1791, 
about four months after the publication of Burke's Reflections, he 
was ready with his reply to it, which he named " The Eights of 
Man." The two works from that time were competitors for the 
possession of the public mind ; editions quickly following editions ; 
each work execrated, and each extolled, with almost equal extrava- 
gance. Paine, with his usual generosity, gave up his copja-ight as 
soon as he discovered that it was an obstacle to cheaper issues ; and 
at once, in every town where there was a press not controlled by 
squire or pa,rj^on, there was a sixpenny edition of The Rights of 
Man. One hundred thousand copies were sold before the demand 
abated; and when the author followed up his success, the next year, 
with a Second Part, the gorernment gave a prodigious impulse to 
the sale of both by a series of prosecutions, accompanied by a 
system of riots, — so familiar a resource of the Tory party in every 
recent age, from James I. to Dilke. 

To say that Mr. Paine's pamphlet is superior to Burke's in every 
worthy quality of composition, is not to praise it ; for Burke's pro- 
duction is a shallow, misleading, pernicious work. Let me rather 
say, that it is as good an answer to Burke as so rambling a rhapsody 
admits ; and that for every one of Burke's swelling passages of 
declamation, Paine has an epigram wdiich reduces it to its proper 
dimensions. So compassionate a man as Thomas Paine could not 
fail to be shocked at Burke's insensibility to all the anguish endured 
in France except that suffered by a few conspicuous individuals : 
" He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." " His hero or 
his heroine must be a tragedy victim expiring in show, and not the 
real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dun- 
geon." Burke's lamentation over the abolition of titles in Prance 
gave Paine an opportunity : " France has outgrown the babyhood 
of count and duke, and breeched itself in manhood. France has 
not levelled, it has exalted. It has put down the dwarf to set up 
the man. . . . Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand 
to contract the sphere of man's felicit3^ He lives immured within 
the Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of 



422 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

man," On the union of Cliurcli and State, extolled by Burke, 
Paiae<;^ad a happy word: "Take away the law-establishment, and 
every religion resumes its original benignity. In America a 
Catholic, priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good 
neighbor ; an Episcopalian minister is of the same description ; and 
this proceeds, independent of men, from there being no law-estab- 
lishment in America." 

The work was dedicated to George Washington, who cherished 
for t-liis skilful and humane writer that warmth of grateful regard 
which is due from the patriotic sword to the patriotic pen. When 
Paine was about to leave Paris, in the spring of 1790, it was to his 
hands that Lafayette intrusted, for transmission to the president, 
the interesting relic which is preserved to this day at Mount 
Vernon. " I take over with me to London," he wrote to a friend in 
Philadelphia, March 16, 1790, "the key of the Bastille, which the 
Marquis intrusts to my care as his present to General Washington, 
and which I shall send by the first American vessel to New York." 
He was to go back to Paris in time to take part in the inauguriition 
of the new constitution; "at which time there is to be a procession, 
and I am to return to Paris to carry the American flag." Pie added 
these words, the prophetic meaning of which the lapse of eighty- 
three years has not exhausted: "I wish most anxiously to see my 
much-loved America. It is the country from whence all reforma- 
tion must originally spring." Nor did he forget that America, too, 
like all the rest of the world, needed reformation; and he wished 
that "a few well-instructed negroes could be sent among their 
brethren in bondage ; for, until they are enabled to take tlieir own 
part, nothing will be done." 

His dedication to the president was in harmony with his habitual 
feelings : " I present you a small treatise in defence of those princi- 
ples which your exemplar}^ virtue hath so eminently contributed to 
establish. That the rights of man may become as universal as your 
benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of see- 
ing the new world regenerale the old, is the prayer of ... . Tho- 
mas Paine." 

A single cop}'- of the work chanced to reach America about the 
first of May, 1791, in advance of the parcel sent by the author to 
the president. This copy was lent by the owner to Madison, who 
lent it to Jefferson j but, before the secretary of state had finished 



THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 423 

reading it, the owner called upon him for it, as he had promised to 
lend it for reprinting. The owner, discovering tliat Mr. Jefferson 
had not done with it, asked him to send it liimself, when he had fin- 
ished the reading, to Mr. Jonathan 13. Smith, a noted merchant of 
Philadelphia, once a member of Congress, whose brother, Samuel 
H. Smith, an enterprising young printer (founder in 1800 of the 
National Intelligencer at Washington), was to issue the American 
edition. Mr. Jefferson complied with this request. Not being 
acquainted, with the merchant, he wrote him a short note to explain 
why he, a stranger, should send him the pamphlet, and. added a 
few words of commendation of the work, "to take off," as he 
explained afterwards, "a little of the dryness of the note," and, as 
he might have added, because he was tlirilled with triumphant 
delight at so vigorous and. telling a vindication of American princi- 
ples from a pen identified in the popular mind with the gloom and 
glorj^ of the Revolution. "I am extremeh' pleased," he wrote, "to 
find it will be reprinted here, and that something is at length to be 
publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up 
among us. I have no doubt our citizens will rally a second time 
round tli£ standard of Common Sense." 

So little importance did he attach to this hasty note, that he, the 
most scrupulous docketer in the world, did not keep a copy of it. 
In a few days the pamphlet was published ; and behold, printed, on 
the cover, the material sentences of this note, attributed distinctly 
to the "Secretary of State"! "I was thunderstruck," he tells us, 
fearing that an excited public, applying the remark concerning 
" political heresies " to Mr. Adams's Discourses upon Davila, 
recently stopped by the growing indignation of the people, would 
force him to an antagonism with the vice-president. And who 
would believe the indorsement unauthorized ? He was the more 
embarrassed, because he really had had those Discourses in his mind 
while writing the note. In familiar, half-jocular conversation with the 
vice-president, he had combated those "political heresies," always 
feigning to be ignorant of the author of Davila. Davila, indeed, 
had no friends ; Hamilton liimself censuring the Discourses, as ill- 
timed and injudicious. But ante-chamber chaff was verj'- different 
from an open, serious collision between two officers of a government 
still on trial. 

The mutterings of a coming storm were soon audible. A JMajor 



424 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Beckwitli from Canada was loitering then about Philadelphia, a 
non-commissioned, semi-autliorized, semi-recognized British agent, 
who was in punctual attendance at presidential levees, where he 
conversed freely with the president's secretary, Tobias Lear, who 
used to report the conversations at large to the president. The 
excellent Tobias, a dear lover of gossip, had much to tell General 
Washington (absent at Mount Vernon) in his letter of May 8, 1791, 
of the astonishment of this major on seeing Mr. Paine's work dedi- 
cated to the president of the United States, and commended by the 
secretary of state. The scene occurred at " Mrs. Washington's 
drawing-room." "Major Beckwith was "surprised," not only at the 
dedication, but that the work should be "published in Philadelphia; " 
"especially as it contained many remarks that could not but be 
offensive to the British government." A highly Pickwickian con- 
versation followed : — 

Lear. The pamphlet was written and published in England. 
The president has neither seen nor knows what it contains, and, of 
course, cannot in any sense be considered as approving its senti- 
ments, or as being responsible for them. 

Beckwith. True : but I observe in the American edition, that 
the secretary of state has given a most unequivocal sanction to the 
book, as Secretary of State ; it is not said as Mr. Jefferson. 

Lear. I have not seen the American, or any other edition of this 
pamphlet ; but I will venture to sa}'- that the secretary of state has 
not done a thing which he would not justify. 

Beckwith. On this subject you will consider, that I have only 
spoken as an individual, and as a j^rivate person. 

Lear. I do not know you, sir, in any other character. 

Beckwith. I was apprehensive that you might conceive, that, on 
this occasion, I meant to enter the lists in more than a private char- 
acter. 

At this moment they were interrupted, and the awful conversa- 
tion was not resumed. But the next day, when Mr. Edmund Ban- 
dolph dined with Mrs. Washington " in a family wa}'^," Mr. Lear 
related to him what had passed. The attorney-general thought the 
matter important enough to report to his colleague, and asked him 
if he had authorized the printing of his note. Mr. Jefferson said he 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 425 

Lad not, though he approved the work. The faithful Tohias, a few 
days after, had an opportunity to learn the sentiments of the vice- 
president. " I was at the vice-president's house," he records, " and 
while there Dr. and Mrs. Rush came in. The conversation turned 
upon this book, and Dr. Rush asked the vice-president what he 
thought of it. After a little hesitation, he laid his hand upon his 
breast, and said in a very solemn manner, ' I detest that book and 
its tendency, from the bottom of my heart.' " 

As yet, however, though the reprint was rapidly spread abroad, 
eagerly read, and hotly discussed, the slow newspaper of the period 
was silent. About the middle of May, 1791, Jefferson and Madi- 
son, both exhausted with official labor during the session of Con- 
gress, set out on a tour to the northward, which they had long before 
promised themselves, leaving politics and all its irritations and 
misconceptions behind them. 

Up the Hudson by sloop, — the true way, always, of enjoying it, — 
and then onward from Albany to Lake George on horseback, a ride 
of sixty miles, mostly through the primeval wilderness, with a taste 
of Saratoga water on the way, as it bubbled up from the springs 
where the deer had licked or lapped it from the beginning of time. 
A hut or two, and one frame-house built by General Schuyler seven 
years before, were all that man had done to mark the site ; although, 
from the time (1767) when Sir William Johnson had been carried 
to Saratoga in a litter to drink the waters so highly extolled by his 
Indians, and had found them salutary, the springs had enjoyed a 
certain vague celebrity. All the scenes near by, made famous by 
Burgoyne's vain struggle with wild nature and brave men, they 
visited also ; " the cataracts of the Hudson," too, of course, — great 
marvels then. The limpid crystal of Lake George, and the luxu- 
riant foliage on its banks, awoke all the enthusiasm of the two Vir- 
ginians, to whom some of the trees, and many of the shrubs, were 
new. "Lake George," wrote Mr. Jefterson to his daughter, "is, 
without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw." They 
walked to the picturesque, commanding bluff on which Fort Ticon- 
deroga stood so long, its site still marked by ruins ; and they visited 
the other spots of bloody memory in that region, as we do now; but 
not, like us, with guide-book in hand, for all that gorj' history was 
fresh and vivid theii in every one's memory. Lake Cliamplain they 
did not see to advantage, — the day on which they crossed it being 



426 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

rough and gusty; and they were not far enough north to see tho 
three ranges of mountains in one view, — Green, Wliite, and Adiron- 
dacks, — a multitudinous, billowy sea of mountains. But, while 
crossing tliis lake, lie wrote a long letter to one of his daughters in 
a little book of birch-bark, which still exists ; and some of the com- 
pany shot at the squirrels swimming from New York to Vermont, 
where the States are three miles apart. Reaching Bennington, in 
Vermont, on a Saturday evening, they were detained till Monday 
haorning, "the laws of the State not permitting us to travel on 
Sunday." Tliey crossed the State of Vermont to a point near uin- 
brageous Brattleborough, on the Connecticut Biver ; and, floating 
down that uncomfortable and capricious stream, made their way by 
the Sound to New York, and reached Philadelphia, in perfect health, 
after a month's journey of a thousand miles. 

These summer holidays of our modern life are delightful enough ; 
only the getting into harness again is so disagreeable. Upon reach- 
ing Philadelphia, the secretary'- of state found the newspapers in full 
cry after him. Mr. Paine's pamphlet, to use Jefferson's homely 
expression, had " kicked up a dust." There was a young lawyer in 
Boston, named John Quincy Adams, aged twenty-four, who did not 
approve the pamphlet, and perhaps still less the indorsement of 
Thomas Jefferson, and his seeming fling at the vice-president. 
This 3'oung lawyer, fresh from the courts of Europe, not the best 
school in which to learn the rights of man, answered " Mr. Pain " 
in a series of seven short newspaper essays, signed Publicola ; not 
omitting to give the secretary of state a fair hit in passing, though 
polite and de(;orous to both. The fair hit was in reference to Mr. 
Jefferson's unlucky use of the word "heresies." Publicola asked, 
" Does he consider the pamphlet of Mr. Pain as the canonical book 
of political scripture ? As containing the true doctrine of political 
infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in a single 
point ? The expressions would, indeed, implj^ more : they seem, like' 
the Arabian prophet, to call upon all true believers in the Islam of 
democracy to draw their swords, in the fervor of their devotion, to 
compel all their countrymen to cry out, There is but one Goddess of 
X/iberty, and Common Sense is her prophet ! " 

This was but a fair retort, as Mr. Jefferson once acknowledged; 
but the young gentleman px'oceeded to discourse upon the sujieri- 
ority of the British system of government over the new Prench con- 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 427 

stitution eulogized by Paine ; and he did this so well, that the essays 
were republished in England, with the name of John Adams on the 
title-page, as an antidote to what the Tories of the period courteously 
styled '"the French disease." But the American people, who had 
had experience for a century and a half of the badness of the gov- 
ernmental system of Great Britain, did not relish the essays of Pub- 
licola. The leading principles of Thomas Paine's Eights of Man 
were, as Mr. Jefferson remarked at the time, " the principles of the 
people of the United States." They are such at this moment. The 
doctrines of the work, if they could now be put to the vote, would be 
sustained by a majority of a thousand to three. A political party 
might as well place itself in opposition to the multiplication table. 
Hence, as soon as Publicola appeared, Brutus, Agricola, Cato, and 
other noble Romans, threw themselves into the arena to defend the 
persons and axioms assailed, and thus "kicked up the dust" to 
which Mr. Jefferson alluded. 

"I thank God," he wrote to Paine soon after, "that the people 
appear firm in their republicanism, notwithstanding the contrary 
hopes and assertions of a sect here, high in name but small in num- 
bers. These had flattered themselves that the silence of the people 
under the 'Defence' and 'Davila' was a symptom of their conver- 
sion to the doctrine of King, Lords, and Commons. They are 
checked at least by your pamphlet, and the people confirmed in their 
good old faith." And to Colonel Monroe ; " A host of writers have 
risen in favor of Paine, and prove, that, in this quarter at least, the 
spirit of republicanism is sound. The contrary spirit of the high 
officers of government is more understood than I expected. Colonel 
Hamilton avows that he nt'ver made a secret of his principles, yet 
taxes the imprudence of Mr. Adams in having stirred the question, 
and agrees that ' his business is done.' Jay, covering the same 
principles under the veil of silence, is steadily rising on the ruins of 
his friends." 

Colonel Hamilton was mistaken in supposing that the vice-presi- 
dent's "business was done." The newspaper storm, however, 
alarmed Mr. Adams not a little. Mr. Jeff'erson gave him an expla- 
nation of the circumstances attending the publication of his note, 
which restored to its usual cordiality the old friendship between 
them, — a friendship, said Mr. Adams in reply, "which ever has 
been and still is very dear to my heart." But no private explanation 



428 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

could still the tempest out of doors. Chimeras dire haunted the 
vice-president's mind. "It is Hiought by some," he wrote to Jeffer- 
son, "that Mr. Hancock's friends are preparing the way by my 
destruction for his election to the place of vice-president, and that of 
Mr. Samuel Adams to be governor of this Commonwealth ; and then 
the Stone-house faction " (Mr. Hancock lived in a stone house) 
"will be sure of all the loaves and fishes." All of which might have 
speedily come to pass if the later excesses and woful collapse of the 
French Kevolution had not afforded a new, though short, lease of 
Kfe to the old ideas, and given pause to all but the stanchest and 
farthest-sighted republicans. It was Robespierre that balked the 
Stone-house faction, — if there was such a faction; and it was the 
murder of the amateur locksmith of the Tuileries, beginning to be 
known as " Mr. Capet," that suspended the decline of the author of 
Davila. 

Thus was Thomas Jefferson, the man of all others most averse to 
controversy, placed, without act or volition of his own, at the head 
of the Eepublicans of the United States. He took no part in the 
public strife. " I never did in my life," he wrote to Mr. Adams on 
this occasion, " either by myself or by any other, have a sentence of 
mine inserted in a newspaper without putting my name to it ; and I 
believe I never shall." Nor do we ever find his name appended to 
any controversial piece or passage in the papers of his time. 

But in the privacy of the president's cabinet the questions of the 
day were discussed between Colonel Hamilton and himself with ever- 
growing warmth. There was little harmony between them after the 
publication of Mr. Paine's Eights of Man, though no personal 
breach occurred for another year. On 'nearly every subject there 
was a difference between them, either of sentiment or of opinion ; and 
on some points the difference was such that neither could quite 
believe in the other's sincerity, flamilton, for example, could not 
comprehend, and therefore could not respect, the state of mind which 
caused Jefferson to oppose his darling, long-cherished scheme of a 
United States Bank. Other nations have national banks : why 
should not we? Jefferson replied in the words of the Constitution: 
" All powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, 
nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to 
the people." To which plain statement of fundamental law, Hamil- 
ton opposed his mere opinion : "Congress can be considered as under] 



* 



1 



THE FRENCH DEVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 429 

only one restriction which does not apply to other governments, — 
they cannot rightfully apply the money they raise to any purpose 
merely or purely local." Hamilton laughed at the '•' metaphysical 
whimseys " of the strict-constructionists, and predicted that " the 
most incorrigible theorist among the opponents of the bank would, 
in one month's experience as head of the department of the treasury, 
be compelled to acknowledge that it is an indispensable engine in the 
managenient of tlie finances^ 

In this dispute we find another proof, that, when two honest men 
differ, both are much in the right. How convenient, urged the sec- 
retary of the treasury, to have bank-notes that would be current in 
all the States of the Union ! True, said Jefferson ; and it would be 
still more convenient to have a bank the bills of which should be 
current all over the world ; but it does not follow that there exists 
anywhere authority to establish such a bank ! The bank was estab- 
lished, and proved an element of discord and a menace of evil, from 
the day of its creation to that of its final suppression in 1836. But 
the single utility which Hamilton claimed and Jefferson admitted 
has since been constitutionally attained by that most exquisite 
device of finance, the National-bank system of the United States. 

Suppose 7101V we had a Bank of the United States, with a capital 
of, say three hundred and fifty millions of dollars (about equivalent 
to the tliirty-five millions of 1830), overshadowing Wall Street, its 
president holding the^ame relation to the business of to-day which 
Nicholas Biddle held to that of 1830 ! 



CHAPTER XLVII. 

THE QUAKREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 

Politeness appears to have been invented to enable people who 
would naturally fall out to live together in peace. And there is 
great need of etiquette in a world where antipathy plaj's a part not 
less essential than sympathy. It is as necessary to the continuance 
of animated nature that cat and dog should hate, as that cat and cafc 
should love. A genuine and profound antipatliy, therefore, may 
exist without either of the parties being to blame; and, in our com- 
plicated civilization, vast numbers of us are compelled to live in the 
nearest intimacy, or labor in the closest contact, with persons 
between whom and ourselves there is this incurable dislike. In 
such cases there is no peace, no dignity, save through the resolute 
observance of all the etiquette which the situation imposes. 

It was this tliat kept our two secretaries, Jeiferson and Hamilton, 
on friendly terms with one another for many months after both had 
discovered that they differed in toto and on every leading question. 
A breach of etiquette finally embroiled them past reconciliation. It 
was difficult to quarrel with Jefferson ; since, besides being naturally 
placable and good-tempered, he had a vivid sense of the value of 
peace and a singular knowledge of the arts by which peace is pre- 
served. He advised his daughters to avoid breaking with disagree- 
able people as long as they could with honor. Sacrifices and sup- 
pressions of feeling for such an object, he thought, cost much less 
pain than open separation. The effort of self-control was soon for- 
gotten ; but an open breach " haunts the peace of every day." 

Hamilton, too, though much spoiled by applause too early and 
too easily won, seemed a good fellow ; amiable at home, agreeable 
abroad; who sang his old song of The Drum at the annual dinner of 
the Cincinnati, and was welcome in all companies and circles till politi- 

430 



THE QUARREL OP JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 481 

cal differences imbittered men's minds. What a pleasant picture 
we have of the breakfast scene at his liouse, No. 2i Broadwaj', the 
mother seated at the head of the table, with a napkin in her lap, 
cutting slices of bread from a great family loaf of the olden time, 
and spreading them with butter for the younger boys, who stood 
round her, reading in turn from the Bible or Goldsmith's History of 
Rome ; while the father, in the room adjoining, was seated at the 
piano playing an accompaniment to his daugliter's new song, or 
singing it to her accom]ja!iiment. When the lessons were finished, 
and a stately pile of bread and butter was ready, all the eight chil- 
dren carae to breakfast ; after which, the younger ones were packed 
off to school, and the father went to his office. 

Who more amiable than that father? There is a portrait of Mrs. 
Hamilton, ,as one of her sons relates, bearing the name of the 
painter, " T. Earle, 1787," which attests his goodness of heart. 
Earle was in the debtors' prison at the time, and Hamilton induced 
his 3"oung wife to go to the prison and sit for her portrait. She per- 
suaded other ladies, and thus the artist gained monej^ enough to pay 
his debts and get out of jail. No man was more ready than Hamil- 
ton to set on foot such good-natured schemes, though himself never 
too far from the debtors' prison. At this very time, — 1791 to 
1794, — while he was handling millions upon millions of the public 
money, he was pinched severely in the effort to live upon his little 
salar3^ "If you can conveniently lend me twenty dollars for a few 
days," he wrote to a friend, in September, 1791, " be so good as to 
send it by the bearer." The friend sent a check for fifty dollars. 
And Talleyrand said, in 1794, after coming from Hamilton's house, 
/' I have beheld one of the wonders of the world, — a man who has 
made the fortune of a nation laboring all night to support a famil3%" 

Hamilton, alas! had more to support than a family. Two fami- 
lies, at least, we know he was supporting at this time; for it was 
during 1791 and 1792 that he had his affair with the Reynolds, which 
obliged him to buy the silence of the husband by the payment of a 
quarter's salary, not to mention smaller " loans " whenever that hus- 
band chose to apply. 

Talleyrand made another remark upon Hamilton. When Mr. 
George Ticknor visited him in 1819, the old diplomatist was so 
warm in his eulogy of Hamilton, that the American was disposed 
modestly to waive part of the compliment by saying that the public 



432 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

men of Europe liad to do with larger masses and wider interests. 
" But," said Talleyrand, " Hamilton had divined Europe." He 
ma}'' have divined Europe. His misfortune was, that he had not 
divined America. In Europe, after a drill of twenty-five years in 
the British House of Commons, he might have been another Can- 
ning, a liberal Tory, the forerunner of Peel and Palmerston. In 
American politics it was impossible that he should ever have been at 
home, because he never could believe the truths, nor share the hopes, 
upon which the American system is based. In an ordinary period, 
however, he might have co-operated with Jefferson, for a while, 
both being gentlemen and patriots ; but the time was not ordi- 
nary. Cliristendom was losing its senses ; and the discussions of 
the cabinet had a bass accompaniment out of doors, ever deepening, 
always becoming more vehement. And it is but fair to remember, 
that, if Jefferson had the inarticulate masses of the American people 
at his back, Hamilton was ceaselessly flattered by the articulate 
class, — the bar, the bench, the college, the drawing-room, the pul- 
pit, the bureau. These two men, even if they had not become 
mutually repellent, would have been pulled apart by their adher- 
ents. 

When the government, in 1790, removed from New York to Phil- 
adelphia, John Pintard, the translating clerk in the Department of 
State, chose not to go with it; and Jefferson gave the place — salary 
two hundi'ed and fifty dollars a year — to the " poet Freneau," an 
old college classi^ate and friend of Madison and Henry Lee. Cap- 
tain Philip Freneau, a native of New York, besides being a kind of 
mild American Peter Pindar, had suffered and sung the horrors of 
the New York prison-ships during the Revolutionary War. He 
was the bright, jDopular writer of his day, both in prose and 
verse; and, as he had contemplated "the British model" from the 
pestilential steerage of the Scorpion, frigate anchored in the Hudson, 
he was never "bewitched" by it, but remained, to the end of his 
long life, a sound republican. No appointment could have been 
more natural, more proper, or more agreeable to the public. In 
recommending it, Mr. Madison's chief motive was to promote the 
interest of his friend, then gaining a precarious and slender liveli- 
hood as man-of- all -work on the New York Daily Advertiser. But 
he had another object in view. Bestive under the opposition of 
Hamilton's organ at Philadelphia, the Gazette of the United States, 



THE QUAREEL OF JEFFEESON AND HAMILTON. 433 

Madison and Governor Henry Lee of Virginia had formed the project 
of setting up a weekly republican journal at the seat of government, 
to be edited, perhaps, by Captain Freneau. This scheme, half formed 
at the time of the appointment, could not Iput have had the approval 
of the secretary of state, stranger though he was to Freneau; and 
this may have suggested a remark which the secretary made in his 
note, offering him the place. The salary, Mr. Jefferson observed, 
was very low; but the ofSce "gives so little to do as not to inter- 
fere with any other calling the person may choose, Avhich would not 
absent him from the seat of government." 

Eight months after, October 31, 1791, appeared the first number 
of the National Gazette, edited by Philip Freneau ; capital fur- 
nished by Madison and Lee ; twenty-one subscribers previously 
obtained by Jefferson among his neighbors in Virginia. Thus 
there were two Gazettes at Philadelphia, — Fenno's daily and 
Freneau's weekly ; the one Hamiltonian, the other Jeffersonian. 
But the only part which the secretary of state took in the manage- 
ment of Freneau's Gazette was to lend the editor the foreign news- 
papers which came to the de]3artment. "I never did," he once 
wrote, "by mj'self or any other, or indirectly, say a syllable, nor 
attempt any kind of influence, . . . nor write, dictate, or procure 
any one sentence to be inserted, in Freneau's or any other gazette, 
to which my name was not affixed, or that of my office." The 
enter^irise was chiefly Madison's, who wished to have a weekly 
paper of republican politics for circulation in all the States, Bache's 
daily paper not going much bej'ond the city of Philadelphia. Jef- 
ferson's sympathy with the object was complete ; but the fact of 
Freneau's holding an office in his department is itself a kind of 
proof that he could not have regarded or used the paper as a jier- 
sonal organ. How absurd the supposition that a "politician" 
would thus display his hand! If Freneau's Gazette had been 
designed as Jefferson's organ, Jefferson surely would have begun 
by removing Freneau from office. 

If the; reader will turn over^the files of Fenno, preserved in 
several j)ublic libraries, he will perceive the need there was of some- 
thing antidotal to it, No opportunity was lost by the editor of 
reflecting upon republican institutions ; and the adulation of the 
president was unceasing and offensive. Whatever question was 
.uppermost, this Gazette of the L^nited States might be depended 

28 



434 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

upon for taking the side least characteristic of the United States. 
The burden of its song was, government by tlie people is anarchy. 
If any one ventured to ask a Federalist, Why, then, are we not 
anarchic ? the answer was, The high character of the jiresident, 
and the universal awe which that character inspires, hold the dema- 
gogues in some decent show of restraint. It is Washington that 
saves us, not our ''shilly-shally Constitution." 

When Freneau's Gazette appeared, defending Paine, attacking 
Burke, criticising Hamilton's measures, especially his new Bank of 
the United States, and commending Jefferson's public acts, Fenno 
affected to be aghast. The morning after Freneau's second number 
was circulated, a writer in Fenno, without mentioning the name of 
the audacious sheet, burst into the most ludicrous fury. He began 
by saj'ing that there were acts of baseness and villany so atrocious, 
that we could hardly persuade ourselves to believe that any of the 
human race were depraved enough to commit tliem ; and he pro- 
ceeded to mention a crime or two of this description, such as 
firing a city in the dead of night. But there is a depth of deprav- 
ity, he continued, far beyond that. Such offences are of a mild 
type of turpitude compared with the revolting blackness of the one 
which he introduces to the reader's notice in his closing paragraph : 
"In a free republic, the officers of the people are entitled to double 
honor, because thej have no inheritance in their office, and, when 
actuated by just principles, accept of public employments from 
motives superior to mercenary considerations. The crime, there- 
fore, of individuals who devise the destruction and imbrue their 
hands in the innocent blood of such characters, is tinged with the 
blackest hue of hellish darkness." 

Such was the spirit of a paper that derived an important part of 
its revenue from the patronage of the government, and an important 
portion of its contents from the pens of high officers of the govern- 
ment. Freneau continued his gazette, however, and did not refrain 
from imbruing his hands in the innocent blood of an eminent 
public character. H^ proceeded to the length of mentioning the 
secretary of the treasury by name. He descanted freely upon all 
that Hamilton had done, and all that he proposed; admitting many 
communications from republican friends; doing all that in him lay 
to controvert and ridicule the writers in Fenno, and defend the 
principle of government by the people for the people. Eeaders who 



TBTE QUARREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 435 

examine the file will find it difficult to believe that satire so mild 
and invective so harmless should have had power to kindle wrath in 
Federal minds. 

Antipathjj-, meanwhile, w^as grpwing in the hearts of Jefferson 
and Hamilton, blinding both, misleading both. It is of the nature 
of antipathy to distort the view, and shut the mind to truth ; and 
when it reaches the degree of rendering social intercourse difficult 
and mutual explanation impossible, men may advance from miscon- 
ception to misconception, untif the idea they have of one another 
becomes monstrous. fNever before, since they were born, had either 
of these two encountered immovable opposition. The lives of both 
had been too easily triumphant. From their youth up they had 
experienced little but acquiescence, sympathy, and applause, until 
they met in Washington's cabinet, and each discovered in the 
other an invincible antagonist. The self-love of both was deeply 
wounded. Hamilton owned that he took Jefferson's opposition to 
the bank as a wrong done to himself. "Mr. Jefferson," he says, 
"not only delivered an opinion in writing against its constitutional- 
ity and expediency, but he did it in a style and manner which I 
felt as partaking of asperity and ill-humor toward ??ie." This to 
Colonel Carrington, May, 1792. But who can now discover in 
Jefferson's opinion on the bank one word savoring of asperity or 
ill-humor ? On the contrary, it seems studiously void of offence, 
full of regpect for opposing opinions, and ends by advising the 
president to sign the bill "if the pro and con hang so even as to 
balance his judgment." This, he thought, would be paying only 
"a just regard to the wisdom of the legislature." 

Miserable error, to attribute difference of opinion to baseness of 
biotive ! Oliver Wolcott, comptroller of the treasury, Hamilton's 
echo and successor (as genial a soul as ever cracked a walnut), 
betrays his chief's blinding antipathy in his letters of this time. 
"]Mr. Jefferson," he writes, February, 1792, "appears to have shown 
rather too much of a disposition to cultivate vulgar prejudices; 
accordingly, he will become poJDular in ale-houses, and do much 
mischief to his country by exciting apprehension that the govern- 
ment will operate unfavorably." The comptroller interpreted the 
Publicola controversy, too, in his own merry fashion: "Mr. Adams 
and Mr. Jefferson seem much disposed to quarrel on the question, 
whether liberty can be maintained in a country which allows citi- 



436 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

zens to be distinguished by the addition Mr., Esq., and Deacon^ 
and whether Thomas Paine or Edmund Burke are the greatest 
fools." Hamilton's grammar was better than Wolcott's ; but he, 
too, was at first disposed to laugh^at Jefferson's notion of abolishing 
the small, lingering absurdities of the feudal sj-stem. But he soon 
ceased to laugh. Under Freneau's attacks, he became, very early 
in 1792, as sour and bitter in his feelings toward his colleague as so 
good-tempered a man could be; and he poured out all his heart to 
his old comrade, Colonel Carrington of Virginia, He said he was 
convinced — "unequivocally convinced" — that "Mr. Madison, co- 
operating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a faction decidedly 
hostile to me and to my administration, and actuated by views, in 
my judgment, subversive of the princij)les of good government, and 
dangerous to the union, peace, and happiness of the country." 

Such was Hamilton's conviction in May, 1792 ; and it remained 
his conviction until that fatal day in July, 1804, when he stood at 
Weehawken before Burr's pistol, a conscious martyr. What reasons 
had he for thinking so! He gives them at great length to Colonel 
Carrington : Madison and Jefferson disajiproved his financial meas- 
ures ! They had openly said so; Madison in debate, Jefferson in 
conversation, — yes, even in conversation v^nih foreigners ! Some 
persons, whom the secretary of state " immediately and notoriously 
moves," had even whispered suspicions of his official integrity. It 
was also "reduced to a certainty," that Freneau, a "known anti- 
Federalist," had been " brought to Philadelphia by Mr. Jefferson to 
be the conductor of a newspaper." And such a newspaper! Evi- 
dently devoted to the subversion of vie and my measures, as well as 
unfriendly to the government ! Moreover, both Madison and Jeffer- 
son (and here Hamilton rises into capital letters) " had a woman- 
ish ATTACHMENT TO FRANCE, AND A WOMANISH RESENTMENT 

AGAINST Great Britain ; " and this to such a degree, that, un- 
checked, they would in six months bring on " an open war 
BETWEEN THE United States AND Great Britain ! " Mr. Jeffer- 
son was especially and extravagantly addicted to these womanish 
propensities. 

"In France," continues Hamilton, "he saw government only on 
the side of its abuses. He drank deeply of the French philosophy, 
in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the 
moment of a fermentation which he had a share in exciting, and in 



THE QUAEEEL OF JEFFEESON AND, HAlvnLTON. 437 

the passions and feelings of whicli lie shared, both from tempera- 
ment and situation. He came here, probably, with a too partial idea 
of his own powers, and with the expectation of a greater share in 
the direction of our councils than he has in reality enjoyed. I am 
not sure that he had not marked oi;t for himself the department of 
the finances. He came electrified ^Zi/s with attachment to France, 
and with the project of knitting together the two countries in the 
closest political bands. Mr. Madison had always entertained an 
exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge, and virtues of Mr. Jeffer- 
son. The sentiment was probably reciprocal. A close correspond- 
ence subsisted between them during the time of Mr. Jefferson's 
absence from this country. A close intimacy arose on his return. . . . 
Mr. Jefferson was indiscreetly open in his approbation of ]\Ir. Madi- 
son's principles on first coming to the seat of government. I say 
indiscreetly, because a gentleman in one department ought not to 
have taken sides against another in another department." 

Both the Virginians, he thought, were chagrined and out of humor, 
because, so far, he had usually triumphed over the opposition of one 
or both of them ; and he proceeds to enumerate his victories, — fund- 
ing, assumption, the bank, and others, — a " current of success on 
one side, and defeat on the other," which had " rendered the opposi- 
tion furious." And worse defeat was in store for them ; for it was 
evident, he thought, beyond a question,, that " Mr. Jefferson aims, 
with ardent desire, at the presidential chair; " and, of course, Hamil- 
ton's influence with the community must be destroyed; and here the 
secretary of the treasury owns that he had already aided to frustrate 
the imaginary ambition of his colleague. It had been a question 
who should be president pro tern., in case both the president and 
vice-president should die in office. Some members of Congress had 
proposed the chief justice, Mr. Jay ; Mr. Madison had moved the 
secretary of state. 4' I acknowledge," says Hamilton, " though I 
took far less part than was supposed, I ran counter to Mr. Jefferson's 
wishes ; for, if I had had no other reason for it, I had already expe- 
rienced opposition from him, which rendered it a measure of self- 
defence." Finally, he read Mr. Jefferson thus : " A man of pro- 
found ambition and violent passions." 

Thus may one honest and patriotic man misread another, when, 
attempting to evolve his character from the depths of his own con- 
sciousness, the gall of an antipatliy tinges his thoughts. 



438 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFERSON. 

The mere clifTerence of opinion between tliem was extreme. One 
day in April, 1791, when the vice-president and the cabinet dined 
together at Jefferson's house to talk over some public question, the 
conversation turned, as it often did in those days, upon forms of 
government. " Purge the British Constitution of its corruption," 
said Mr. Adams, '•' and give td its popular branch equality of repre- 
sentation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised 
by the wit of man." Hamilton waited a moment, and then said, 
" Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality 
of representation, and it would become an impracticable government. 
As it stands at present, with all its supj^osed defects, it is the most 
perfect government that ever existed." What intelligent American 
citizen, whose memory of public events ran back to 17C5, and who 
had access to the pigeon-holes of the state department, could be 
expected to listen to such an opinion without something like indig- 
nation ? 

But, in truth, when Hamilton pronounced the word govermnent, 
he meant something radically diiferent from Jefferson's idea of gov- 
ernment. What is government ? Jefferson's answer would have been : 
An agency for the execution of the people's will. Hamilton must 
have answered : A means of curbing and frustrating people's will. 
The British government had proved \tse\i practicable, by being able, 
in the teeth of the people's will, to alienate and repel the American 
Colonies ; and it had accomplished this by buying voters at the 
polls, and voters in the, House of Commons. Hence, in a Hamilto- 
nian sense, it was a " practicable " government. There were mem- 
bers of Congress who had a pecuniary interest in supporting 
Hamilton's financial system. This he regarded as legitimate and 
desirable ; wdiile good republicans could only think of it with horror, 
as if jurymen should sit in judgment on a cause in which their 
fortune was embarked. « 

A few months after, Hamilton seized an opportunity to explain 
himself to his colleague. Jefferson mentioned to him, in August, 
1791, that he had received a letter from Mr. Adams, disavowing 
Publicola, and denying that he had ever had any wish to introduce 
the hereditary principle. Hamilton censured the vice-president for 
having stirred questions of that nature in the newspapers. " I 
own," he added, " it is my own opinion, though I do not publish it in 
Dan or Beersheba, that the present government is not that which 



THEQUAEREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 439 

will answer the ends of society by giving stability and protection to 
its rights, and that it will probably be found expedient to go into 
the British form. However, since we have undertaken the experi- 
ment, I am for giving it a fair coarse, whatever my expectations 
may be." Hence, he thought Mr. Adams was wrong, however pure 
his intentions, to disturb, by the discourses on Davila, the public 
confidence in the present order of things. These avowals, appar- 
ently deliberate and made for a purpose, Jefferson thought worthy 
of preservation; and this conversation, accordingly, is the first of 
the "Anas" which give us so many interesting glimpses of the 
interior of General Washington's cabinet. 

To this radical difference of opinion was added a grievance which 
was at once public and personal, wounding both to Jefferson's pat- 
riotism and pride. Hamilton was an inveterate lobbyist. Excluded 
from Congress by the Constitution, he nevertheless endeavored to 
exercise as much influence over legislation as an English Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer who sits in Parliament. In his published 
correspondence, he mentions, with evident elation, several instances 
in which he had procured the passage or the rejection of measures. 
Upon occasions he would even threaten to resign, unless he had his 
way ; and such was his ascendency, that this absurd insolence 
provoked from his adherents neither resentment nor ridicule. The 
Republican members objected to the reference of legislative prob- 
lems to members of the cabinet; regarding the cabinet as part 
of the executive power. Hamilton could not so much as believe 
that a member of Congress could have any other than a factious 
reason for opposing such a reference. • He distinctly claimed it, as 
belonging to his office, to perform the duty which now devolves upon 
the Committee of Ways and Means. He regarded himself as an 
injured being when Madison opposed the reference to the secreta,ry 
of the treasury of the qiaestion of waj^s and means for the Indian 
War. Madison, he says, even went so far as to " combat, on jprln- 
ciple, the propriety of such reference ;" well knowing, that, *' if he 
had prevailed, a certain consequence was my resignation." Late in 
the debate he became apprised of the danger. "Measures of coun- 
teraction," he says, " were adopted ; and when the question was 
called, Mr. Madison was confounded to find characters voting 
against him whom he had counted upon as certain." 

Now, this interference with legislation was the more aggravating 



440 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

to Jefferson, because the secretary of the treasury had such a vast 
patronage with which to make his interference effectual : one hun- 
dred clerks at Philadelphia, a custom-house at every port, bank- 
directors, loan-agents, — a thousand places in his gift. And these 
places were not the trivial and demoralizing gifts which a cabinet 
minister has at his disposal now, — the brief, precarious teniire of 
under-paid offices. A government office was then a career. You were 
a made man if you got one. A peaceful and dignified life could be 
founded upon it, and a family reared. Hamilton wielded more power 
of this kind than all the rest of the administration put together, 
multiplied by ten ; and it is reasonable to conclude, that some voters 
in Congress (not as many, perhaps, as Jefferson thought) were influ- 
enced by the interest members had in Hamilton's various financial 
measures. 

Before he had been a 3'ear in office, the secretary of state had had 
enough of it. Scrupulously avoiding all interference with the 
departments of his colleagues, never lobbying, immersed in the 
duties of his place, he found himself borne along by Hamilton's rest- 
less impetuosity, and conapelled to aid in the execution of a policy 
which he could as little approve as prevent. He was nominally at 
the head of the cabinet, without possessing the ascendency that 
belonged to his position. He seemed to himself, at once responsible 
and impotent ; and he believed the sway of Hamilton over public 
affairs to be illegitimate, and to be upheld by illegitimate means. 
In the spring of 1791, when he had been in the cabinet little more 
than a year, he discovered, from a sentence in one of the president's 
letters to himself, that he had no thought of serving beyond the end 
of his term, which would expire March 4, 1793. Jefferson instantly 
resolved to make that the period of his own service also. He longed 
for repose. His affairs clamorously demanded his attention. He 
was utterly devoid of commonplace ambition. All pageantry was 
wearisome to him. If, in liis earlier years, he had coveted the kind 
of distinction which place conferred, he had outgrown that foible 
long ago, and had now for himself but one wish, — to enjoy a busy, 
tranquil existence at home, among his farms, his books, his appa- 
ratus, his children, and his friends. What man above forty-five, not 
a fool, has ever had, for himself alone, any other dream but that? 

With regard to the presidency, no one had as yet presumed to 
publish a conjecture as to what an infant nation was to do, when, at 



THE QUAEEEL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 441 

last, deprived of its "father," it should he obliged — to tise Jeffer- 
son's expressi9n — to "go alone." Adams, Jay, and Jefferson were 
the three names oftenest whispered in conversation ; but the situ- 
ation was not ripe for any thing bej'ond a whisper, and all patriotic 
men concurred in desiring General Washington's continuance. 

It was in February, 1792, in the course of a conference upon post- 
office affairs, that Jefferson disclosed to the president his intention 
to retire. It was not yet clear whether the post-office belonged to 
the Department of State or to that of the Treasury, and Jefferson 
wished the question settled. He told the president, that, in his 
opinion, it belonged, and ought to belong, to the State Department, 
because, among other reasons, the Treasury Department was already 
too powerful ; wielding " such an influence as to swallow up the 
whole executive powers," so that "even the future presidents, not 
supported by the weight of character which himself possessed, would 
not be able to make head against it." He disclaimed all personal 
interest in the matter. If he was supposed to have any aj^petite 
for power, the intervening time was too short to be an object, for his 
own tenure of office would be exactly as long as that of the i>resi- 
dent's. " My real wish," said he, " is to avail the public of every 
occasion, during tlie rest of the president's period, to place things 
on a safe footing." 

The conversation was interrupted here at its most interesting 
moment. The president asked him to^ breakfast with him the next 
morning, in order that tlie subject might be resumed. They met 
accordingly ; and, when the post-office question had been duly con- 
sidered, the president revived the topic of Jefferson's intention to 
retire. " In an affectionate tone," he told Jefferson that he had 
felt much concern at the intelligence. For his own retirement there 
were reasons enough, and he enumerated them ; but he should con- 
sider it unfortunate if his own return to private life should bring on 
the resignation of the great officers of the government, which might 
give a sliock to the public mind of dangerous consequence. Jeffer- 
son tried to re-assure the president on this point. He did not believe, 
he said, that any of his brethren thought of resigning. On the 
contrary, at the last meeting of the trustees of the sinking-fund, 
the secretary of the treasury had developed a plan of operations which 
contemplated years of his own personal service. 

General Washington was not re-assured by this statement. He 



442 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

clung to Jefferson. He remarked, that lie considered the Depart- 
ment of the Treasury less important and less conspicuous than the 
Department of State, which "embraced nearly all the objects of 
administration," and that the retirement of a secretary of state 
would be more noticed. Symptoms of dissatisfaction, he added, 
far beyond what could have been expected, had lately shown them- 
selves ; and to what height these miglit arise, in case of too great a 
change in the administration, could not be foreseen. 

Upon this Jefferson's tongue was loosed, and he expressed him- 
self, without reserve, in words like these : " In my opinion, there is 
only a single source of these discontents, — the Treasury. A system 
has there been contrived for deluging the States with paper-money 
instead of gold and silver ; for withdrawing our citizens from the pur- 
suits of commerce, manufactures, buildings, and other branches of 
useful industry, to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species 
of gambling destructive of morality, which has introduced its poison 
into the government itself. It is a fact, as well known as that you 
and I are notv conversing, that particular members of the legisla- 
ture, while those laws were on the carpet, feathered their nests with 
paper, then voted for the laws, and constantly, since, have lent all 
the energy of their talents, and the instrumentality of their offices, 
to the establishment and enlargement of their system. They have 
chained the system round our necks for a great length of time ; and, 
in order to keep the game in their own hands, they have, from time 
to time, aided in making such legislative constructions of the Consti- 
tution as make it a very different thing from what the people 
thought they had submitted to. And now they have brought for- 
ward a proposition far beyond any one advanced before ; to which 
the eyes of many are now turned, as the decision which is to let us 
know whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government." 

" To what proposition do you allude ?" asked the president. 

"To that," replied Jefferson, " in the Report of Manufactures (by 
Hamilton), which, under color of giving bounties for the encourage- 
ment of particular manufactures, meant to establish the doctrine, 
that the Constitution, in giving power to Congress to provide for the 
general welfare, permitted Congress to take every thing under their 
charge which thetj should deem for the public welfare. If this was 
maintained, then the eniimeration of powers in the Constitution 
does not at all constitute the limits of their authority." 



THE QUAEREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 443 

With this topic the conversation ended. The mingling of justice 
and injustice in Jeiferson's observations is obvious. He was chiefly 
unjust in ascribing the ill-working of some of Hamilton's measures to 
design ; whereas, the infl.ation of values, and the consequent mania for 
speculation, were unforeseen, and were by no one more regretted than 
by Hamilton. The real grievances of the Republicans at that mo- 
ment were two: 1, Hamilton's free-and-easj'' construction of tlie Con- 
stitution. 2, The interference of the Treasury Department with legis- 
lation. During that very week the Republicans made a serious effort 
toward turning the secretary of the treasury and his allies out of the 
lobby bj'' breaking up the system of referring questions to membei's of 
the cabinet. After a long debate, the House adjourned without com- 
ing to a vote ; but Madison and his friends went home that afternoon 
in the highest spirits, so sure were they of victory on the day follow- 
ing. During the evening, as the}^ believed, the special adherents of 
the secretary of the treasury bestirred themselves with such effect, 
that, — to employ Jefferson's own words, — " The Treasur)/ carried 
it by thirty-one to twenty-seven." But even this triumph was 
esteemed only the forerunner of defeat, so omnipotent had the Treas- 
ury once been. "It showed," Jefferson thought, "that Treasury 
influence was totten'ng." 

So far the personal intercourse between the two diverging minis- 
ters was agreeable ; and we even observe in their official correspond- 
ence an apparent effort to conciliate. In March, 1792, Jefferson 
submitted the draught of a cabinet paper for Hamilton's review and 
emendation ; and when it came back with comments, Jefferson 
appears to have made a point of accepting as many of his colleague's 
suggestions as possible. Out of ten emendations he adopted all but 
one, which would have involved a looser construction of the Consti- 
tion than he approved. As late as February, 1792 (a month before 
the conversation 'with the president), Jefferson, in returning his col- 
league's Report on the Mint, commended the performance, suggested 
a change or two, and ended his note thus : " I hazard these thoughts 
to you extempore, and am, dear sir, respectfully and affectionately 
yours." 

This, however, was the year of the presidential election. For the 
presidency, there was, indeed, but one candidate ; but Mr. Adams's 
incoherences upon Davila, and his son's essays in the name of Pub- 
licola, cost him a severe contest for the vice-presidency; George 



444 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

Clinton of New York being the candidate of the Republicans. 
Need it be said that the two Gazettes, Fenno and Freneau, improved 
the occasion ? But how mild the prose and verse of Captain Fre- 
neau compared with the vituperation and calumny which have since 
made the party press as powerless to abase as to exalt ! 

" On Davila's page 

Your discourses so sage 
Democratic numsciiUs bepuzzle, 

With arguments tough 

As white leather or butF, 
The Republican bull-dogs to muzzle!" 

It is to be i^resumed that the vice-president did not take seriously 
to heart such fooling as this, which is a fair enough specimen of 
"Jonathan Pindar's" doggerel. Hamilton and his friends were 
assailed in prose not quite so pointless. Perhaps the following was 
as " severe " as most of the editorial paragraphs, if only from its con- 
taining a portion of truth : " The mask is at length torn from the 
monarchical party, who have, with but too much success, imposed 
themselves upon the public for the sincere friends of our republican 
Constitution. Whatever may be the event of the competition for the 
vice-presidency, it has been the happy occasion of ascertaining the 
two following important truths; First, that the name of Federalist 
has been assumed by men who approve the Constitution merely ' as 
a promising essay toward a well-ordered government;' that is to 
say, as a step toward a government of King, Lords, and Commons. 
Secondly, that the spirit of the people continues firmly republican." 
Often, however, the secretary of the treasury was specially designated ; 
and his financial system was always condemned, as Jefferson con- 
demned it in the hearing of the president. 

When Hamilton read his Freneau, week after week, during that 
exciting summer of 1792, he read it, not at all as the publication of 
Captain Philip Freneaix, mariner and poet, but, wholly and always, 
as the utterance of Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state. He was 
right, and he was wrong. Jefferson, to people like-minded with 
himself, was a pervading and fascinating intelligence. His easy 
manners, his long experience, his knowledge of nature, men, and 
events, his sanguine trust in man, his freedom from inhuman pride, 
his prodigious Christianity, his great gifts, his great fame, and his 



THE QUARREL OP JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 445 

great place, all conspired to make him the oracle of his circle, as he 
was the soul of his party. Freneau could not help iufusing a good 
deal of Jefferson into almost every thing he wrote. But although 
that was the only kind of influence which the secretary of state ever 
exerted over the pen of his translating clerk, Hamilton could not 
believe it. He took it for granted that the National Gazette was 
edited in his colleague's office, with his colleague's assistance, for the 
purpose of subverting himself. Irritated and indignant, the secre- 
tary of the treasury composed, July 15, 1791, the epistle following, 
and had it inserted iu the other Gazette, — the Gazette of the 
United States : — 

" Mr. Fen'no, — The editor of the National Gazette receives a 
salary from government. 

" Qucere. Whether this salary is paid him for Translations, or for 
publications, the design of which is to vilify those to wliom the voice 
of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs, 
— to oppose the measures of government, aild, by false insinuations, 
to disturb the public peace ? 

" In common life it is thought ungrateful for a man to bite the 
hand that puts bread in his mouth ; but, if the man is hired to do it, 
the case is altered. T. L." 

Freneau was not politician enough, nor guilty enough, to pass by 
this hint in silence. He repelled the insinuation, which gave 
Hamilton a pretext for following it up. A series of strongly 
written, incisive articles, from the pen of the secretary of the treas- 
ury, appeared in Fenno; in which Jefferson was attacked by name. 
Some of these articles (there were twelve in all) were signed, " An 
American ; " others, " Amicus ; " others, " Catullus ; " one, " Metel- 
lus ; " one, " A Plain, Honest Man : " but all of them are included 
in the authorized edition of the works of Alexander Hamilton. 
They appeared from time to time, during the rest of the presiden- 
tial " campaign ; " calling forth replies from " Aristides " and other 
sages of antiquity, but eliciting no printed word from Jefferson. 
The burden of the earlier numbers was, that Mr. Freneau was 
brought from New York to Philadelphia, and quartered upon the 
government, by Mr. Jefferson, for the purpose of establishing a 



446 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

gazette hostile to the government. (Denied by Freneau on oath.) 
When tliat topic was exhausted, Colonel Hamilton endeavored to 
show, by fragments of Jefferson's letters to Madison from France, 
that his colleague had been an original opponent of the Constitution. 
(Disproved by Madison's publishing the whole of the quoted pas- 
sages.) Plarailton proceeded to descant upon Mr. Jefferson's indorse- 
ment of Paine's reply to Burke : accusing him, first, of an intention 
to wound and injure Mr. Adams ; and, secondly, of a dastardly 
denial of the same, when he found that "discerning and respectable 
men disapproved the step." After relieving his mind of many a 
column of fluent and vigorous outrage, he called upon Mr. Jefferson 
to resign his oflice. 

"If," said Metellus, "he cannot coalesce with those with whom 
he is associated, as far as the rules of ofScial decorum, propriety, 
and obligation may require, without abandoning what he conceives 
to be the true interest of the community, let him place himself in a 
situalion in which he will experience no collision of opposite duties. 
Let him not cling to the honor or emolument of an oflBce, whichever 
it may be that attracts him, and content himself with defending the 
injured rights of the people by obscure or indirect means. Let him 
renounce a situation which is a clog upon his patriotism." 

The effect upon the public mind of this ill-timed breach of offi- 
cial decorum was such as we should naturally suppose it would be. 
The thin disguise of the various signatures adopted by the secretary 
of the treasury deceived only readers distant from the capital, and 
them not long ; for Hamilton, besides betraying himself by the 
power of his stroke, seems, in some passages, to have courted dis- 
covery, — pushing aside the gauzy folds of the curtain, and all but 
crjnng out. Behold, it is I, the administration! "Society" 
applauded. The drawing-room eyed Jefferson askance. It could 
not quite cut a secretary of state, but its bow was as distant as its 
habitual deference to place and power would permit ; and to this 
day, if indeed we can be said to have a drawing-room now, it has 
loved to repeat the traditional disparagement. But the articles had 
not the political effect which their ingenious author intended ; for, 
while they emphasized Jefferson's position as the Republican chief, 
they really — so Federalists themselves report — lowered Hamilton 
in the view of the country. He lost that prestige of reserve and 
mystery that gathers round a name associated in the public mind 



THE QUAEREL OP JEFFEESOK AND HAMILTON. 447 

only with affairs of national magnitude, and subjects of general 
importance. The people were not pleased to discover, in an adviser 
of the president, a partisan, positive, vehement, ingenious, and 
unjust, a coarse assailant of a name hallowed by its association with 
the birthday of the nation. Hamilton lost something which is of 
no value to an anonymous writer in a presidential "campaign," but 
is of immense value to a public man, — weight. And, with all 
this, he did not retard the development of the new-born opposition. 
George Clinton received fifty electoral votes for the vice-presidency, 
Jefferson four, and Burr one, to seventy-seven for Mr. Adams. 

There was one man in the country who was great enough to do 
justice to both these men, and to feel only sorrow for their dissen- 
sions. How the president tried to reconcile them is a pleasing and 
noble passage of his historj'. He wrote a kind, manl}'' letter to each 
of them, employing similar arguments and several identical phrases 
in both letters ; reminding them of the difEculties and dangers of 
the country's position, encompassed as it was by avowed enemies 
and insidious friends, and urging them to a more charitable Inter- 
pretation of one another. 

Both secretaries replied, as it chanced, on the same day, Septem- 
ber 9, 1792. Hamilton owned that he had attacked his colleague 
in the newspapers, and intimated, that, for the present, he could not 
discontinue his assaults. He justified his conduct thus : " I hriotv 
that I have been an object of uniform opposition from Mr. Jefferson, 
from tlie moment of his coming to the city of New York to enter 
upon his present office. I know, from the most authentic sources, 
that I have been the frequent subject of the most unkind whispers 
and insinuations from the same quarter. I have long seen a formed 
party in the legislature under his auspices, bent upon my subver- 
sion. I cannot doubt, from the evidence I possess, that the National 
Gazette was instituted by him for political purposes ; and that one 
leading object of it has been to render me, and all the measures 
connected with my dejiartment, as odious as possible." These, how- 
ever, were personal wrongs, which he had resolved to bear in silence. 
But when he saw that a party had been formed "deliberately bent 
upon the subversion of measures, which, in its consequences, would 
subvert the government," then he had felt it to be his duty to 
defeat the nefarious purpose by "drawing aside the veil from the 
principal actors." 



448 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

Jeflferson's rop]y was long, vehement, and powerful. So far as it 
was exculpatory of liimself, it was i:>erfectly successful ; but, at such 
a moment, he must have been either more or less than man to have 
been just to his antagonist. Nor is there any one now alive compe- 
tent to say precisely how far he was unjust to him. AVho can tell 
us to what point "treasury influence" may have influenced legisla- 
tion, and how far Colonel Hamilton may have deemed it right and 
legitimate to enlist the interests of men on the side of what he 
called "government"? One thing we do know: the rule which 
Jefferson prescribed for his own conduct as a member of the cabinet 
is the true republican rule. "If," said he, "it has been supposed 
that I have ever intrigued among the members of the legislature to 
defeat the plans of the secretary of the treasury, it is contrary to 
all truth. As I never had the desire to influence the members, so 
neither had I any other means than my friendships, Avhich I valued 
too highly to risk by usurpations on their freedom of judgment and 
the conscientious pursuit of their own sense of duty." 

This was the right view to take of the limits prescribed by the 
spirit of the Constitution to his place. But, though we know Ham- 
ilton gloried in holding an opposite opinion, we do not know how 
far he carried his ideas in practice. That he interfered liah'ttuaXhj 
in legislation, and was proud of his success in so doing, his letters 
plainly reveal. Jefi'erson charges him with using his power as min- 
ister of finance to control votes. "That I have utterly," writes the 
secretary of state, " in my private conversations, disapproved of the 
system of the secretary of the treasury, I acknowledge and avow ; 
and this was not merely a speculative difference. Plis system 
flowed from princijjles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to 
undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of 
his department over the members of the legislature. I saw this 
influence actuallj^ produced, and its first fruits to be the establish- 
ment of the great outlines of his project by the A'otes of the very 
persons, who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves out 
to profit by his plans; and that had these persons withdrawn, as 
those interested in a question ever should, the vote of the disinter- 
ested majority was clearly the reverse of what they tuade it." He 
accused his colleague, too, of defeating the system of favoring 
French commerce and retaliating British restrictions, by cabals with 
members qf Congress. 



THE QUAEREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 449 

Another retort of Jefferson's gives pause to the modern inquirer. 
Who can say with any thing like certainty, whetlier, in the passage 
following, Mr. Jefferson uttered truth pure and simple, or truth 
colored, distorted, and exaggerated by antipathy ? 

" I have never inquired," said he, " what number of sons, relations, 
and friends of senators, representatives, printers, or other useful 
partisans, Colonel Hamilton has provided for among the hundred 
clerks of his department, the thousand excisemen, custom-house offi- 
cers, loan-oflBcers, appointed by him, or at his nod, and spread over 
the Union ; nor could ever have imagined, that the man who has 
the shuffling of. millions backwards and forwards from paper into 
money, and money into paper, from Europe to America, and Amer- 
ica to Europe, the dealing out of treasury secrets among his friends 
in what time and measure he pleases, and who never slips an occa- 
sion of making friends with his means, — that such a one, I say, 
would have brought forward a charge against me for having 
appointed the poet Freneau, translating clerk to my office, with a 
salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a year." 

A passage followed, in relation to this appointment, wliich had a 
wonderful currency years ago, and is still occasionally revived. He 
declared, that, in appointing Freneau, he had been actuated by the 
motive which had induced him to recommend to the president for 
public employment such characters as Kittenhouse, Barlow, and 
Paine. " I hold it," he added, " to be one of the distinguishing 
excellences of an elective over hereditary succession, that the talents 
which Nature has provided in sufficient proportion should be 
selected by the society for the government of their affairs, rather 
than that this should be transmitted through the loins of knaves 
and fools, passing from the debauches of the table to those of the 
bed." 

In conclusion, he said, that, as the time of his retirement from 
office was so near (only six months distant), he should postpone any 
public reply which he might deem it best to make to the Fenno 
articles until he was a private citizen, — a period to which he looked 
"with the longing of a wave-worn mariner, who has at length the 
land in view, and shall count the days and hours which still lie 
between me and it." Then he would be free to defend himself, 
without disturbing the quiet of the president; but, if he did break 
silence, he should subscribe his name to whatever he wyote. Con- 



450 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOISr. 

scious, he said, of having merited the esteem of liis countrymen, which 
he dearly prized, h}' an integrity which could not be reproached, and 
by an enthusiastic devotion to their rights and to liberty, he " would 
not suffer his retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man 
whose history, from the moment at which history could stoop to 
notice him, was a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the 
country which had not only received and given liim bread, but 
heaped its honors upon his head." But during the short time he 
had to remain in office, he should find. " ample employment in closing 
the present business of the department." 

This letter was written at Monticello. On his way to Philadel- 
phia he stopped, as usual, at Mount Vernon, when the president 
renewed the subject in conversation, and urged him to reconsider 
his intention to refeign ; for he "tliought it important to preserve 
the check of his opinions in the administration to keep things in 
the proper channel and prevent them from going too far." The 
check ! The check to what ? The president said he did not believe 
there were ten men, worth consideration, in the country, who had so 
much as a thought of transforming the republic into a monarchy. 
Mr. Jefferson replied that there was " a numerous sect who had 
monarchj'' in contemplation, of whom the secretary of the treasury 
was one." The most intimate friend Hamilton ever had was Gou- 
yerneur Morris, who pronounced his funeral oration. This exquisite 
writer stated Hamilton's opinions at much length in 1811, in a 
letter to Eobert Walsh of Piiiladelphia. The following are some of 
Morris's expressions: "General Hamilton disliked the Constitution, 
believing all republican government radically defective. , . . He 
hated republican government. . . . He trusted, that, in the changes 
and chances of time, we should be. involved in some war, which 
might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. . . . He 
never failed on every occasion to advocate the excellence of, and 
avow his attachment to, monarchical government." The other 
points of difference were gone over, but without lessening Mr. Jeffer- 
son's passionate desire to retire from public life. But, on reaching 
Philadelphia, friends insisted on his remaining in office with such 
pertinacity, and offered reasons so cogent, that he knew not how 
either to rebut or accept them. 



CHAPTEE XLVIII. 

CAUSES. OF HIS DESIRE TO RESIGN. 

No language can overstate his longing for retreat. Six months 
before the Fenno assaults began, this had been the burden of his 
letters to his family and friends. " The ensuing year," he wrote to 
his daughter, in March, 1792, "will be the longest of my life, and 
the last of such hateful labors : the next we will sow our cabbages 
together." To other friends he said that the 4th of March, 1793, 
was to him what land was to Columbus. He had sent to Scotland 
for one of the new threshing-machines, and a plough of his invention 
had recently won a medal in France. He had engaged mechanics 
in Europe to work upon his house, and upon other schemes which he 
had formed. He was packing his books in view of the termination 
of the lease of his house in Philadelphia, and had arranged for one 
of its inmates, " Jack Eppes," to enter William and Mary in the 
spring. Schemes upon schemes were forming in his mind for extri- 
cating his great estate from encumbrance, and turning its latent 
resources to better account than could be expected from overseers. 
But the attacks in the newspapers and tlae hostility of powerful 
classes, though they intensified his desire for repose, seemed to 
interpose a barrier which he could not pass. He was torn with con- 
tending emotions. " I have been," he wrote to his daughter in 
Januarj^, 1793, " under an agitation of mind which I scarcely ever 
experienced before, produced by a check on my purpose of returning 
home at the close of this session of Congress." Madison, Monroe, 
Page, Randolph, all friends and all partisans, united in the opinion 
that he must not give the Federalists the triumph of being able to 
say, with an appearance of truth, that Hamilton had driven him 
from office. He consented, at length, to remain a short time longer. 
He sent most of his library home, sold the bulkier articles of his fur- 

451 



452 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

niture, gave np his house, took three rooms in the suburhs, and 
" held himself in readiness to take his departure for Monticello the 
first moment he could do it with due respect to himself." Thus he 
wrote to the father of " Jack Eppes," in April, 1793. 

But why this agonizing desire for retirement? Thereby hangs a 
tale. If we give ten reasons for a certain course of conduct, there is 
often an eleventh which we do not give; and that unspoken one is 
apt to be the reason. He could no longer aiFord to serve the public 
on the terms fixed by Congress. It was not merely that his salary 
did not pay the cost of his Philadelphia establishment, nor that his 
estate was ill-managed by overseers. An ancient debt hung, as he 
says, "like a millstone round his neck," — a debt which he had 
twice paid, although not incurred by him. Upon the death of his 
■wife's father, twenty years before, he had received property from his 
€state worth forty thousand dollars, but subject to a British debt of 
thirteen thousand. Impatient of debt, he sold a fine farm near Mon- 
ticello for a sum sufficient to discharge it ; but, by the time he 
Teceived the money, the war of the Revolution had begun. Vir- 
ginia invited all men owing money to Great Britain to deposit the 
same in her treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the Brit- 
ish creditor after the war. The identical coin w^hich Jefferson 
received for his farm he himself carried to the treasury in Williams- 
burg, where it was immediately expended in equipping troops. 

The legislature of Virginia, however, thought better of this 
policy, rescinded the resolution, and returned the sums received 
under it. But Jefferson was obliged to take back his thirteen thou- 
sand dollars in depreciated paper, which continued to depreciate 
until it was worthless. In fact, the thirteen thousand dollars just 
sufficed to buy him one garment; and in riding by that farm, in 
after years, he would sometimes point to it, and say laughing, 
*' That farm I once sold for an overcoat." At the end of the war, 
during which Cornwallis destroyed more than enough of his prop- 
erty to pay this debt, he had, as he remarked, " to lay his shoulders 
to the payment of it a third time," in addition to a considerable 
debt of his own, incurred just before the outbreak of hostilities. 
"What the laws of Virginia," he wrote to his creditor in England, 
"are, or may be, will in no wise influence my conduct. Substan- 
tial justice is my object, as decided by reason, not hy authority or 
comDulsion." Ever since the war closed, he had been struggling to 



CAtJSES OF niS DESIRE TO RESIGN". 453 

reduce these debts, and finally made an arrangement for paying 
them off at the rate of four hundred pounds sterling a year. How 
easy this ought to have been to a person owning ten thousand acres 
of excellent land, "one hundred and fifty-four slaves, thirty-four 
horses, five mules, two hundred and fortj'-nine cattle, three hundred 
and ninety hogs, and three sheep ! " But only two thousand acres of 
his land were cultivated ; nine of his horses were used for the saddle; 
and the labor of his slaves had been for ten years directed by over- 
seers. In 1793 the greater part of the debt remained to he dis- 
charged ; and he saw, whenever he visited Monticello, such evidences 
of "the ravages of overseers" as filled him with alarm. He had 
now a son-in-law to settle, a second daughter to establish, a moun- 
tainous debt to pay, a high office to live uj) to, and an estate going 
to ruin. Behold his eleventh, unuttered reason for the frenzy which 
possessed him to live at home. 

He might well desire to see the reign of overseers brought to an 
end on his estate. Eeaders remember, perhaps, General Washing- 
ton's experience with them. How, when he owned one hundred and 
one cows, he was compelled to buy butter for his own, table ; and 
how, after building one of the best barns in the country, where 
thirty men could conveniently wield the flail, he could not prevent 
his manager from treading out the grain with horses, — so impossible 
was it, he says, " to put the overseers of this country out of the 
track they have been accustomed to walk in." He reached home for 
his annual vacation in 1793, about the middle, of September, and 
caught this truly conservative gentleman in the act. "I found a 
treading-yard," wrote the president, " not thirty feet from the barn- 
door, the wheat again brought out of the barn, and horses treading 
it out in an open exposure, liable to the vicissitudes of weather." 
With such men to manage, the general thought the new threshing- 
machine would have a brief existence. What need there was, then, 
of the master's eye upon an encumbered estate ! 

Jefferson settled to his work again in Philadelphia, and watched 
for a good opportunity to resign. Through the good offices of the 
president, a truce was arranged between the two hostile secretaries, 
who tried their best to co-operate in peace, not without success. 
Hamilton, in particular, was scrupulously careful to avoid the error 
of interfering, or seeming to interfere, in his colleague's department. 
At heart each felt the sincerity and patriotic intentions of the 



454 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

other, and Jeiferson had even an exaggerated idea of Hamilton's 
ability. The elections, too, of 1792, had strengthened the Republi- 
cans in Congress, who gained a decisive triumph in the first month 
of the session, by defeating (thirty-five to eleven) a proposition to 
allow members of the cabinet to attend the house of Represen- 
tatives, and explain '■'■their measures" to the House. This made it 
easier for Jefferson to continue. And, besides, the French Revolu- 
tion, of late, had turned in arms upon the kings banded against it, 
and seemed to be able, contrary to all expectation, to hold its own. 
As yet nearly all America was in enthusiastic sympathy with 
France. When the news arrived of a movement favorable to the 
French, the "■ monocrats," as Jefferson styled the Oi^Aercrats, made 
wry faces ; but the Republicans set the bells ringing, illuminated 
their houses, and wore a tri-colored cockade in their hats. 

The time was at hand when the youngest of the nations would 
need in its government the best talent it could command, and, 
above all, in the department which directed its intercourse with for- 
eign nations. The French king had been dethroned, and was about 
to be brought to trial, all the world looking on with ah interest diffi- 
cult now to conceive. It stirred Jefferson's indignation sometimes, 
to observe that mankind were more attentive to the sufferings of the 
king and queen than to the welfare of the people of France. " Such 
are the fruits," he once wrote, " of that form of government which 
heaps importance upon idiots, and which the Tories of the present 
day are trying to pneach into our favor." It pleased many of the 
Republicans, however, to learn that Thomas Paine, one of themselves, 
was exerting himself ably to save the king's life. Paine said in 
the Convention, that "Louis Capet," if he had been slightly 
favored by fortune, — if he had been born in a private station in 
" an amiable and respectable neighborhood," — would have been, in 
all probability, a virtuous citizen ; but cursed from the dawn of his 
reason with ceaseless adulation, and reared in " brutal luxury," he 
was a victim of monarchy, as well as the agent of its ill-working. 
England, he reminded the Convention, had cut off the head of a 
very bad Charles Stuart, only to be plagued, a few years after, with a 
worse ; but when, forty years later, England had ha'nished the 
Stuarts, there was an end to their doing harm in the world. 

What a happy stroke was this in a French Assembly ! He followed 
it up by oflering to accompany the fallen king to the only ally 



CAUSES OF HIS DESIEE TO EESIGN. 455 

France then had, the United States, where the people regarded him 
as their friend. "His execution, I assure you," said this master of 
effective composition, ''will diffuse among them a general grief. I 
propose to you to conduct Louis to the United States. After a resi- 
dence of two years, Mr. Capet will find himself a citizen of America. 
Miserable in this country, to which his absence will be a benefit, he 
will be furnished the means of becoming happy in another." 

There was a passage in this speech to which the bloody scenes 
about to occur in Paris give a singular significance. Part of the 
long period of re-action towards barbaric (i.e. ancient) ideas and 
institutions, which began with the French guillotine, and from 
which we are only now emerging, might have been spared mankind 
if Thomas Paine could have spoken French as well as he wrote 
English, and brought this warning home to the Convention with the 
oratorical power of a Mirabeau'. " Monarchical governments," he 
said, " have trained the human race, and inured it to the sangui- 
nary arts and refinements of punishment ; and it is exactly the 
same punishment which has so long shocked the sight and tormented 
the patience of the people, that now, in their turn, they practise in 
revenge upon their oppressors. But it becomes us to be strictlj' on 
our guard against the abomination and perversity of monarchical 
examples. As France has been the first to abolish royalty, let her 
also be the first to abolish the punishment of death." In these 
words spoke the humane spirit in which the French Revolution 
originated. 

The execution of the king, January 21, 1793, saddened every well- 
constituted mind in Europe and America. It lessened the sympathy 
of a vast number of persons with the revolution ; and all but the 
most extreme republicans felt in some degree the infinite impolicy 
of the act. Frgm that time the good-will of mankind for unhappy 
France would have more sensibly diminished, but that the world in 
arms seemed gathering for her destruction. 

It was a mad time. The manager of a Philadelphia theatre 
thought it opportune to revive the tragedy of Cato. Before the play 
began, the company of actors sang upon the stage La Marseilhtlse, 
when the whole theatre rose, and joined in the chorus. At the end 
of each act this performance was repeated. Every evening after- 
wards, as soon as the musicians entered the orchestra, a cry arose 
for La Marseillaise, and no other music would be listened to. 



456 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 

Usually some portion of the audience caught the fury of the piece, 
and thundered out the familiar refrain. But as the guillotine con- 
tinued its ravages, the enthusiasm decreased; and, instead of the 
universal and deafening demand for the French hymn, there would 
be, at length, only a score or two of voices from the gallery, all the 
rest of the house sitting in grim silence. Finally, on a night long 
remembered in the theatre, one defiant soul ventured to give the 
usual sign of disapproval. Instantly the whole house burst into one 
overwhelming hiss ; and never was the terrible piece played again. 
Soon the new song of Hail Columbia took its place in popular regard, 
and was, for some years, played at every theatre just before the ris- 
ing of the curtain. 

The change of government in France produced political complica- 
tions with which the cabinet of General Washington had to deal at 
once and practically. Questions of law and of finance, as well as of 
opinion and sentiment, had to be, not only discussed, but rightly 
decided under penalty of being drawn into the maelstrom of the war. 
Our two " cocks," exasperated by previous encounters, were now 
pitted against each other every day ; but they were under bonds to 
keep the peace, and each was further restrained by the perils of the 
situation. Hamilton, by himself, might have involved the country 
in an entangling alliance with the powers hostile to the revolution. 
Jefferson alone might have found it difficult to avoid a too helpful 
sympathy with beleaguered, bewildered France. The result of their 
antagonism was an honorable' neutrality, useful to France, not 
injurious to the allies, and exceedingly profitable to the United 
States. 

How irreconcilable they were in their feelings respecting the great 
events of 1793 ! " Sir," said Hamilton, in August, to Edmund Ran- 
dolph, " if all the people in America were now assembled, and were 
to call on me to say whether I am a friend to the French Revolution, 
I would declare that I have it in abhorrence." Jefferson, on the 
contraiy, wrote thus to his old friend Short, just before the execution 
of the king : " Mj- own affections have been deeply wounded by some 
of the martyrs to this cause ; but rather than it should have failed, I 
would have seen half the earth desolated ! Were there but an Adam 
and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better 
than as it now is." 

Gouverneur Morris was then American minister in France, — a 



CAUSES OF HIS DESIRE TO RESIGl<r. 457 

very able gentleman and honorably frank in the avowal of his opin- 
ions. ]\Iark this striking sentence, written by him as far buck as 
J 1790 : " The French Assembly have taken genius instead of reason 
' for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wan- 
j der in the dark because they prefer liglitning to light." He meant 
/ Mirabeau. But a few weeks after, writing to General Washington, 
he gave such a list of the ancient abuses which the revolution had 
abolished as amount to a compensation to France for all the revolu- 
tionary miseries she has suffered from Mirabeau to Thiers. As the 
revolution advanced, though Jefferson, in official instructions, had 
cautioned him to avoid the utterance of opinions hostile to the revo- 
lution, he gave such offence to the revolutionary leaders that Lafay- 
ette complained of it to the president. But, in 1792, he redeemed 
himself nobly. Upon the detlironement of the king, when all the 
diplomatic corps left Paris, the American minister alone, rightly 
interpreting his mission, remained. " The position," as he truly 
wrote to Mr. Jefferson, "is not without danger; but I presume, that, 
when the president did me the honor of naming me to this embassy, 
it was not for my personal pleasure or safety, but to. promote the inter- 
ests of my country." And he remained at his post all through the 
period of the terror, though the ministry gave him pretext enough 
for abandoning it, and though even the sanctuary of his abode was 
violated by a committee in search of arms. The fury of the people, 
he wrote to Mr. Jeff"erson, was such as to render them capable of all 
excesses without being accountable for them. The calm courage 
and utter frankness of this splendid old Tory conciliate the modern 
reader. The French ministry, however, abhorred him to such a 
point, that they made it a matter of formal complaint to Mr. Jeffer- 
son, that this representative of a republic, in a despatch addressed to 
the government of a republic (a few days old), had used the familiar 
expression, " Les ordres de MA COUR." 

But the cabinet question was this : The king being dethroned, 
who was authorized to give a valid receipt for the money which the 
United States was paying to France from time to time ? Upon this 
point, the orders of Gouverneur Morris's court were necessary ; and 
the real secret of the animosity of the French ministers was, tliat he 
would not and could not pay over to them the sums due nominally to 
the king. The ministers remonstrated in their own way, and sent 
complaints across the sea. Morris, at his own table, and in the 



458 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

hearing of his servants, indulged himself in calling them a set of 
damned rascals, and in predicting (lie was curiously fond of prophe- 
sying) that the king would have his own again. Upon the pecu- 
niary question, the opinions of the cabinet were divided. 

Jefferson's opinion: Every people may establish what form of 
government they please, and change it as often as they please. But 
the National Assembly of France, to which all power had fallen by 
necessity upon the removal of the king, had not been elected bj^ the 
people of France as an executive body. For the moment, therefore, 
the French government was, at best, incomplete. But a national 
convention had been elected in full view of the crisis, and for the 
express purpose of meeting its requirements. That convention 
would be, when organized, a legitimate government, qualified to give 
a valid receipt to the United States. 

Hamilton's opinion : He doubted whether the convention would 
be a legitimate body. In case the monarchy should be re-estab- 
lished, the king might disallow payments made to it. He was for 
stopping payment altogether until there was something more stable 
and regular established in France. 

On this occasion General Knox, secretary of war, ventured to 
express an opinion. ''For once," says Jefferson, "Knox da^-ed to 
differ from Hamilton, and to express very submissively an opinion 
that a convention named by the whole body of the nation would be 
competent to do any thing." The result was, that the secretary of 
state was requested to write to Gouverneur Morris, directing him to 
suspend payments until further orders. A few daj^s after arrived the 
despatches in which the French ministry complained of the too can- 
did Morris and of his insolent contempt of a sister republic in speak- 
ing of "ma cour." Upon this delicate subject the president 
conversed with the secretary of state in a manner which exhibits 
the situation. 

The President. The extracts from Ternant (French j^lenipo- 
tentiary in Philadelphia) I consider very serious, in short, as decisive. 
I see that Gouverneur Morris can be no longer continued there con- 
sistently with the public good. The moment is critical in our favor 
(that is for getting free-trade with the French West Indies and freer 
trade with France), and ought not to be lost. Yet I am extremely 
at a loss what arrangement to make. 



CAUSES OP HIS DESIRE TO EESIGIT. 459 

Jeffekson". Might not Gouverneur Morris and Pinckney 
(American minister in England) change places ? 

The President. That would be a sort of remedy, but not a 
radical one. If the French ministry conceive Gouverneur Morris to 
be hostile to them, if they were jealous merely on his proposing to 
visit London, they will never be satisfied with us at placing him in 
London permanently. You have unfixed the day on which you 
intended to resign ; yet you appear fixed in doing it at no great dis- 
tance of time. In that case, I cannot but wish that you would go 
to Paris. The moment is important. You possess the confidence 
of both sides, and might do great good. I wish you could do it, 
were it only to stay there a year or two. 

Jeffersost. My mind is so bent on retirement, that I cannot 
think of launching forth again on a new business. I can never 
again cross the Atlantic. As to the opportunity of doing good, this 
is likely to be the scene of action, as Genet is bringing ^^owers to do 
the business here. I cannot think of going abroad. 

The President. You have pressed me to continue in the public 
service, and refuse to do the same yourself. 

Jefferson. The case is different. You unite the confidence of 
all America, and you are the only person who does so. Your ser- 
vices, therefore, are of the last importance. But, for myself, my 
going out would not be noted or known. A thousand others can 
supply my place to equal advantage ; and, therefore, I feel myself 
free. 

The President. Consider maturely, then, what arrangement 
shall be made. 

Here the conversation ended. Mr. Jeiferson did not remind the 
president of the vast difference in their pecuniary condition. He 
did not remark that General Washington was so rich a man, that 
not even the ravages of Virginia overseers could quite ruin him, but 
that Thomas Jefferson could only continue to serve the public at the 
imminent risk of financial destruction. 

Meanwhile Genet was coming, — the first minister sent by the 
Republic of France to the Republic of the United States. The 
Republicans of the United States awaited his arrival with inexpressi- 
ble ardor, and were prepared to give him one of those " receptions " 
for which the country has since become noted, — receptions which are 



460 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

SO amusing and agreeable to all but the victim. Colonel Hamilton, 
was by no means elevated at the prospect of his coming. At a 
cabinet meeting a short time before the landing of the expected 
minister, he had dropped this remark: "When Mr. Genet arrives, 
whether we shall receive him or not will then be a question for 
discussion." 



CHAPTER XLIX. 

GENET COMING. 

It seemed an odd freak of destiny that sent Edmond Genet, a 
2')roterje of Marie Antoinette, to represent the Republic of France 
in the United States. Gouverneur Morris, in liis neat, uncom- 
promising manner, sums up this young diplomatist, aged twenty- 
eight in 1793, as "a man of good parts and very good education, 
brother to *the queen's first woman, from whence his fortune origi- 
nates." Even so. He was a brother of that worthy and capable 
Madame Campan, first yb//i??ie de chamhre to Marie Antoinette, and, 
after the queen's death, renowned through Europe as the head of a 
seminary for young ladies in Paris. It was she who wrote a hun- 
dred circulars with her own hand because she had not money to get 
them printed, and received sixty pupils the first year, — Hortense, 
ere long, from Napoleon's own hand. 

The father of this respectable, energetic family was, nearly all his 
life, under the influence of English and American ideas and persons. 
He lived in England many years, where he acquired familiar com- 
mand of the English language, and a fond, wide acquaintance with 
English literature. Upon returning to his native land he seems — 
if we may judge from the long catalogue of his publications — to 
have adopted it as a profession to make England known to France. 
Beginning with two volumes of Pope's best letters in 1753, he con- 
tinued to publish translations from the English, and original works 
relating to England, until, in 1765, the list embraced twenty-two 
volumes. A few years later, when he held the post of chief clerk 
to the department of foreign affairs, he was in frequent intercourse 
with Dr. Franklin, Silas Deane, Beaumarchais, and all the American 
circle. His house, too, from 1765 to 1781, when he died, was one 
of those agreeable haunts of men connected with literature and art 

461 



462 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

which had, at that period, an eclat rivalling that of the great houses, 
where Power in its cruder forms of wealtli and rank was represented. 
From such a home, it was natural enough tlnit Henrietta Genet, at 
fifteen, should be invited to fill the place of reader to Mesdames the 
sisters of Louis XV., to be in due time advanced to a place of real 
importance in the rcfjlnie of the period, — that of "first woman" 
to the young queen. 

Nor was her brother's career quite such a caprice of fortune as it 
seemed. If, as a boy, he was noted in the palace for the warmth of 
his republican sentiments, it was only that he was in the mode. 
Did not the queen smile benignantly upon Franklin, and chat famil- 
iarly with him while she held the cards waiting her turn to play ? 
Who more distinguished at court than Lafayette, the stern republi- 
can of nineteen? When the queen desired to give young Genet a 
start in the diplomatic career, his grand republican sentiments were 
rather a point in his favor than otherwise; and, at twenty-four, he 
had reached a position in the diplomatic service to which only court 
favor of the most irresistible description could have pushed so young 
a man. He was secretary of legation at St. Petersburg ; whence, 
according to Morris, he wrote in so republican a style, that his 
despatches, read after the dethronement, made his fortune with the 
chiefs of the Gironde, who named him ambassador to Holland, his 
appointment bearing date November 14, 1792. 

Suddenl}"- the programme was changed, for a reason never conjec- 
tured till within these few months past. The Holland commission 
was revoked in December, and M. Genet was appointed to represent 
Prance in America. Genet, it appears, was at once a Girondist and 
a grateful friend to his royal benefactors, whom he was now in the 
habit of styling "Louis and. Madame Capet." The Girondists had 
adopted the scheme proposed by Thomas Paine of sending this 
hapless pair and their children to the United States ; and Genet, as 
we are now assured, was selected for the purpose of promoting the 
project. A well-known writer, who has made a particular study of 
that period, and who apparently derived his information from the 
American family of M. Genet, holds this language, and emphasizes 
it by the use of italics : — 

"M. Genet was selected for the mission to America, by the more 
moderate republicans in France, because of his friendship with 
the deposed monarch, and for the express purpose of conducting the 



GENET COMING. 463 

imprisoned king and the royal family secretly to America. This 
arrangement was entered into at a meeting of the leading Girond- 
ists, at which our own Thomas Paine assisted ; and it was at that 
meeting that M. Genet was tendered the mission, and accej^ted it, 
playfully describing, in response, to what occupations such and such 
of tlie roj'al exiles could be appropriated, on their arrival in Ameri- 
ca." * 

But it was no longer in the power of the more moderate republi- 
cans to control the course of events. If France was mad, England 
was not sane; and the man in England whose voice was mightiest, 
who should have been the great tranquillizing influence of tlie hour, 
was the maddest public man in Europe. " I vote for this (alien) 
bill," said Burke in Parliament, about the time of Genet's appoint- 
ment, "because I consider it as the means of saving my life and all 
our lives from the hands of assassins. When they smile, I see 
blood trickling down their faces : I see that tbe object of all their 
cajoling is blood." How was the mighty fallen ! Here was genius 
stooping to clothe in powerful language the imbecile panic of igno- 
rance. The raving of Burke, by infecting the policy of England, 
was among the influences in the French Convention that decided the 
king's fate. Louis was exiled to the other world, instead of going 
with Genet and Paine to the shores of the peaceful Delaware. A 
few hours after the news of his execution reached London, the 
British government, in effect, declared war against France ; and, as 
soon as this intelligence reached Paris, February 1, 1793, France 
declared war, in form, against England. 

Thus began the bloodiest struggle the modern world has known, 
whicb only ended after Waterloo. There was no pretext for the 
war which will bear the light of to-day. All thrones, it is true, 
were menaced in the fall of the French throne ; and no king felt so 
sure of his head after January 21, 1793, as he had before tliat mem- 
orable date. Here was motive enough for the king of England, but 
not for the realm of Britain. The reason why Great Britain struck 
France in 1793 was, as the world is now informed, because France 
was weak. Such is the explanation given of the origin of this 
infernal war by a work that speaks to foreign nations with an 

* New York Historical Magazine for February, 1871, p. 143. Article by the 
editor, H. P. Dawson. 



464 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

authority semi-official. Fr.ance was sorely afflicted, distracted, anar- 
chic. "All Europe was now leagued against her. Within she was 
divided hy faction, and without she was assailed by immense hosts 
of the best disciplined soldiers of Europe, conducted by the most 
skilful leaders, to whom she had nothing to oppose but an undisci- 
plined multitude, led on by inexperienced chiefs. In this state of 
things it seemed a safe measure to make war against her. To do 
so was only to retaliate the conduct she had herself pursued when 
she effected the dismemberment of the British Empire by assisting 
our revolted Colonies." * Such is the nature of dj'nastic rule. 
Such was that " British form," of which British Hamilton was so 
enamoured. 

It was from the frenzj' and delirium of all this that Citizen Genet 
sailed in the frigate L'Embuscade for the United States. He had, 
indeed, been ranked with the more moderate republicans ; but in 
Februar}'', 1793, moderation was a quality unknown to the heart of 
civilized man. He was a Frenchman ; he was a rei:)ublican ; he was 
twenty-eight; he was bearing to America the news that England, 
too, had sided in arms against his country. Long was this frigate 
tossed upon the wintry deep. She was driven far to the south- 
ward of her course, and the great tidings which she brought reached 
President Washington before L'Embuscade was heard of at the 
seat of government. 

The genius for rectitude which General Washington possessed 
was never so manifest as on this occasion. Passion spoke but one 
voice. Here was our ally attacked by the great naval power of the 
world because she seemed prostrate and helpless ! Here was France 
threatened with dismemberment because she had helped us in the 
crisis of our destiny ! Here was the king who warred upon Ameri- 
cans, because they had demanded to govern America, presuming to 
deny the right of Frenchmen to govern France ! Generosity, justice, 
gratitude, pride, and even policy, appeared to call upon the two 
republics to make common cause against the common foe. Was not 
England the common foe? Did she not hold the United States by 
the throat? What was the retention of the seven posts but sus- 
pended war ? Such were the thoughts that naturally rose in the 
minds of a vast majority of American citizens when the news was 

* Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. v. p. 547. 



GEXET COMING. ' 465 

circulated. The president had but to remain passive, he had but to 
linger another mouth at Mount Vernon, and every vessel that could 
have carried half a dozen guns and forty men would have been 
afloat in quest of British prizes. And to this hour, if you will 
imbue yourself with the spirit of that time, and shut out all tliose 
larger and nobler considerations which alone should control the 
decisions of a government, you will often find yourself ready to 
exclaim. Oh that he had! 

Then, there were treaties with France to be considered, — treaties 
that seemed to many all the more sacred now because they were 
made when France was powerful and we were weak. Knotty ques- 
tions started up as men in 1793 read those two treaties of 1778, — 
one of "Amity and Commerce," and the other of "Alliance," both 
bearing the name of Franklin, both signed by dead Louis. By the 
first, French men-of-war and French privateers might, and British 
might not, bring their prizes into American ports. By the second, 
the United States guaranteed " to his Christian Majesty the present 
possessions of the crown of France in America." 

General Washington was at Mount Vernon when Mr. Jefferson's 
letter reached him, announcing the declaration of war between France 
and England. All the peril of the crisis flashed upon his mind. 
Its difficulties, too, occurred to him as he travelled post-haste to 
Philadelphia ; and on his arrival he drew up, for the instant consid- 
eration of the cabinet, a list of questions embracing the situation : 
Shall we warn our citizens not to interfere in this contest ? Shall 
we formally proclaim ourselves neutral ? Ought we to receive the 
coming Genet ? And, if we ought, how ? Do our treaties with the 
late king hold ? If we have the right to renounce or suspend the 
treaties, is it best to do so ? Would it be a breach of neutrality to 
consider the treaties still in operation? Supposing the treaties in 
force, what precisely are the rights of France, and what precisely are 
'our duties to France ? If the French royal family should send us 
a representative, shall we receive him too ? Ought Congress to be 
convened ? And, if it ought, on what grounds should the call be 
placed ? 

The cabinet met at the president's house on the following day, 
April 19. Upon one of the questions there was a substantial una- 
nimity^ of opinion : it was agreed to notify American citizens that 
they could only join in the fight at their own peril. Mr. Jefferson^ 



466 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

however, prevailed so far as to keep the word '' neutrality " out of 
the proclamation. He preferred that his country should not need- 
lessly declare itself neutral in a contest concerning which its heart 
hilew no neutrality. But on the otlier questions there was a 
difference of opinion in the cabinet which could not sufficiently 
argue itself in words spoken across the table of the president's office. 
To warm debates, long written papers succeeded, in which Hamilton 
displayed more of his fatal ingenuity than usual, and Jefferson all 
the wisdom that comes of a man's central principle being sound. 
The president's questions relating to Fra.nce resolved themselves, it 
was found, into one, namely, Does the decapitation of Louis absolve 
the United States from obligation contracted nominally with him ? 
In other words, Are the treaties still valid ? Was it with France, or 
with Louis, that Ave made them? Here is M. Ternant, the resident 
French plenipotentiary, whose commission bears the king's signa- 
ture ; and somewhere on the ocean is Citizen Genet, coming to 
supersede him, whose commission has been issued neither by Louis 
nor by his heir. 

Shall we receive Genet? Of course, said, in substance, the two 
E-epublicau members, Jefferson and Randolph. We musi, reluc- 
tantl}' said the two Federalists, Hamilton and Knox. But how ? 
As plenipotentiaries are usually received, or with reserves and 
qualifications? It was in discussing this question that the two 
fighting-cocks of the cabinet joined battle, and fought out their 
difference. Hamilton's opinion was, that, before M. Genet was 
admitted to an audience with the president, the government should 
"qualify" that reception by declaring that the question of the 
validity of the treaties was "reserved." In supporting this opinion, 
he took the ground which George JII. had taken in making war 
upon France : he presumed to sit in judgment upon the acts of the 
French people. He arraigned the revolution ! "No proof," said 
he, " has yet come to light sufficient to establish a belief that the 
death of Louis is an act of national justice." He also said, " It 
was from Louis XVI. tha^t the United States received those succors 
which were so important in the establishment of their independence 
and liberty. It was with him, his heirs and successors, that they 
contracted their engagements, by which they obtained those precious 
succors." Amplify these two statements to a vast eixtent ; support 
them by a prodigious number of curiously subtle and remote rea- 



GENET COMING. 467 

sons; throw in the usual citations from Vattel, Grotius, Wolf, and 
Puffendorf ; add some remarks upon the danger of guaranteeing to 
France islands that might he taken by the English, — and you have 
the substance of Hamilton's paper upon the reception of Genet. 

Jeifersou replied to it at much length. Besides giving his col- 
league an ample supply of Vattel, Puffendorf, Grotius, and Wolf, 
arranged in parallel columns, executed with singular neatness, he 
favored him with some joassages of pure Jefferson, which have become 
part and parcel of the diplomatic system of the United States. 

"If," said Mr. Jefferson, ''I do not subscribe to the soundness of 
the secretary of the treasury's reasoning, I do most fully to its inge- 
nuity. ... I consider the people who constitute a society or nation 
as the source of all authority in that nation ; as free to transact their 
common concerns by any agents they think proper; to change those 
agents individuallj^, or the organization of them in form or function, 
whenever they please ; that all the acts done by these agents, under 
the authority of the nation, are the acts of the nation, are obligatory 
on them, and inure to their use, and can in no wise be annulled or 
affected by any change in the form of the government or of the 
persons administering it. Consequently, the treaties between the 
United States- and France were not treaties between the United 
States and Louis Capet, but between the two nations of America 
and France ; and the nations remaining in existence, though loth 
of them have since changed their forms of government, the treaties 
are not a-nnulled by these changes." 

He admitted, however, that, as there are circumstances which 
sometimes excuse the non-performance of contracts between man 
and man, so there are between nation and nation. " When perform- 
ance, for instance, becomes impossible, non-performance is not im- 
moral ; so, if performance becomes self-destructive to the party, the 
law of self-preservation overrules the law of obligation to others. 
For the reality of these principles, I appeal to the true fountains of 
evidence, the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It 
is there Nature has written her moral laws, and where every man 
may read them for himself. He will never read there the permis- 
sion to annul his obligations for a time or forever, whenever they 
become dangerous, useless, or disagreeable." 

It seems strange to us that principles like these could ever have 
been subjects of debate in the cabinet of a president of the United 



468 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

States. The president's decision was, that Genet should be received 
without qualification, that is, without insulting the authority that 
commissioned him. As to the treaties, General Washington told 
Jefferson that he had never had a doubt of their validity ; but, since 
the question had been raised, he had thought it best to have it con- 
sidered. 



CHAPTER L. 

EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 

The proclamation which announced to mankind that the duty 
and interest of the United States required that they should "pursue 
a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers," 
and warning American citizens to avoid all acts inconsistent with 
that policy, was published on the 22d of April, 1793. On that very 
day, as it chanced, news reached the government that L'Embuscade, 
with Genet on board, had put into the port of Charleston, and that 
the minister, wearied of his long voj^^age, would tempt the main no 
more, but would send the frigate to Philadelphia, and perform the 
journey himself by land. 

The people of the United States were troubled with no scruples 
in regard to Genet's commission. They gave him a reception like 
that which, in recent years, astounded and deluded the Hungarian 
Kossuth. It was on the 8th of April that L'Embuscade, of forty 
guns and three hundred men, "Citizen Bompard " commanding, 
cast anchor in the harbor of Charleston, forty-jSve days from Koche- 
fort. M. Genet was so little identified with the extremists in 
France, that, on his way to join his ship, he had been arrested on a 
charge of being concerned in a plot to convey the Dauphin to the 
United States. The ship, on the contrary, made extravagant profes- 
sions of loyalty to the Kevolution. Her figure-head was a liberty- 
cap. On her stern there was a carved representation of the same. 
Her foremast was also converted into a liberty-pole by being crowned 
with that emblematic artisle of attire. Around her mizzen-top was 
a sentence to this effect : " We are armed to defend the rights 
OF MAN." Her main-top bore the following: "Freemen, we are 
YOUR BROTHERS AND FRIENDS." Her fore-top was a warning to 
tyrants; "Enemies op equality, relinquish your principles, 

469 



470 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

OR tremble!" Besides being thus decorated, she came into 
Charleston Harbor with a British prize in her wake, a pleasing fore- 
taste of the rich pickings to which the ocean invited men of enter- 
prise who were also lovers of liberty. 

Charleston was then a city of greater commercial importance than 
it has been within living memory. Many French merchants resided 
there. Amid the fetes, dinners, balls, receptions, which hospitable 
Charleston exchanged with a frigate enthusiastic for liberty, these 
French merchants thronged about Citizen Genet, full of zeal for 
their country, and extremely desirous to display that zeal in the 
profitable form of privateering. They were willing to fit out vessels 
at their own expense : all they asked of Genet was authority. Only 
give us commissions, said they, and we will do the rest. Citizen 
Genet consulted Governor Moultrie on the subject. The governor, 
a better soldier than lawyer, and probably not uninfluenced by the 
prevalent ''exaltation," told him he "knew no law against it," but 
begged, that, whatever he might do iu the way of commissioning 
privateers, he would do without consulting farther the governor 
of South Carolina. What could Genet desire more ? Two vessels, 
bought and equipped by French merchants, manned in part by 
Americans, were commissioned b}^ Citizen Genet ; and L'Embiiscade 
used also to leave her anchorage in the morning, cruise off the har- 
bor all day, and return to safety in the evening. Not a British 
vessel dared stir. Citizen Bompard publicly offered a lieutenancy 
in the French navy to any competent American who would engage 
to pilot the frigate along the coast. He obtained a pilot on these 
terms, and stood out to sea, returning to Charleston no more. 

On her short passage to Philadelphia she captured two British 
prizes, — a brig named the Little Sarah, and a valuable ship called 
:the Grange. Seldom has staid Philadelphia known an afternoon of 
such thrilling excitement as when these vessels cast anchor in the 
Delaware, opposite one of the principal wharves. The frigate's 
thundering salute of fifteen guns — one for each State — could only 
be returned by two field-pieces on Market-street Wharf, and these 
worked by volunteers ; but the cannonade sufficed to summon all the 
movable population of the town to the river-side. The shipping was 
dressed in flags and streamers. Cheers from the spectators saluted 
the frigate as she glided past each dock, answered by cheers from the 
*hip ; and when she had dropped her anchor, her crew swarmed up 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 471 

into the rigging, manned the tops and yards, and gave what a reporter 
of the period stj'led "tliree or four concurrent cheers." The most 
rapturous moment of all, according to Mr. Jefferson, was when the 
Grange was descried with' the British colors upside-down and the 
flag of France fl3'ing above them. The thousands and thousands of 
the 3'eomanry of the city, he tells us, who crowded the wharves, 
** burst into peals of exultation." It was about five in the afternoon 
when L'Embascade cast anchor. Every procurable boat put off to 
her crowded with passengers, until tliere were as many Pliiladel- 
phians on board as Frenchmen. Each boat-load, we are assured, was 
welcomed with effusion. Pliiladelphia ''fraternized" with L'Erabus- 
cade. ''I wnsh," said Jefferson, in a confidential letter to Monroe, 
" we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair 
neutrality." 

Some days after arrived the Citizen Genet, not the plenipoten- 
tiary, but one of the privateers which he had commissioned at 
Charleston, bringing in two more prizes, both British. This was 
cheering indeed. But now Citizen Genet himself was at hand. 
Five weeks had elapsed since his landing at Charleston, — so many 
dinners had he been compelled to eat, and so many ovations to 
undergo, in the cause of libertj'. From Charleston to Philadelphia., 
wherever there were people to make a demonstration, the people 
were only too glad to demonstrate. Nay, more, merchants of Alex- 
andria and Baltimore offered to sell to a beleaguered ally provisions 
below the market price. Six hundred thousand barrels of flour were 
offered Citizen Genet on terms more favorable than those granted to 
the most favored customer. 

On the 16th of May the rumor was spread abroad in Philadelphia, 
that the representative of the French Republic was approaching the 
city from the south. The bells of Christ Church rang out a peal of 
welcome. By every road crowds hurried towards Gray's Ferry ; but 
they were too late: Genet was so fortunate as to get over the river 
and into the city, even to the City Tavern, before any great number 
of the people could intercept him. A committee of seven distin- 
guished Republicans, headed by the venerated Rittenhouse, had 
been appointed to address the plenipotentiary on his arrival. This 
committee, preceded by their chairman, marched toward the hotel, 
three abreast, joined as they M'ent by other citizens, who also walked 
in threes 5 until there was a long line of gentlemen trailing after the 



472 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFF.'CESON'. 

committee. These entered the hotel, and were presented to M. 
Genet, while a prodigious crowd filled the street, and rent the air 
with cheers. The address was read. It was fortunate tlie min- 
ister was familiar with the English language; for, being unpre- 
pared for such a reception, he was obliged to reply extempore. 
His 3'outhful appearance, his bearing, at once aifable and distin- 
guished, the responsive warmth of his demeanor, and even the 
French accent with which he spoke, all served to heighten the 
enthusiasm. 

" I am no orator," he began with faltering tongue, ''and I should 
not at any time affect the language of eloquence. But even in 
uttering the genuine and spontaneous sentiments of my heart, on an 
occasion so interesting and so flattering, I experience some embar- 
rassments, arising from my defective acquaintance with the language 
in which I am about to speak. But this defect, I am certain, free- 
men will readily excuse, if they are convinced of the sincerit}'' of the 
sentiments which I shall deliver. I cannot tell you, gentlemen, how 
penetrated I am by the language of the address to which I have 
listened, nor how deeply gratified my fellow-citizens will be in read- 
ing so noble an avowal of the principles of the Revolution of France, 
and on learning that so cordial an esteem for her citizens exists in a 
country for which they have shed their blood and disbursed their 
treasures, and to which they are allied by the dearest fraternal senti- 
ments and the most important political interests. France is sur- 
rounded with difficulties: but her cause is meritorious; it is the 
cause of mankind, and must prevail. With regard to j'ou, citizens 
of the United States, I will declare openly and freely (for the minis- 
ters of republics should have no secrets, no intrigues), that, from the 
remote situation of America, and other circumstances, France does 
expect that you should become a party in the war; but, remember- 
ing that she lias alread3' combated for your liberties (and if it were 
necessary, and she had the power, would cl^perfully again enlist in 
vour cause), Ave hope (and every thing I hear and see assures me 
our hope will be realized) that her citizens will be treated as brothers 
]n danger and distress. Under this impression, my feelings at this 
moment are inexpressible ; and when I transmit your address to my 
fellow-citizens in France, they will consider this day as one of the 
happiest of their infant republic." 

When M. Genet ceased to speak, the feelings of the auditors, if 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 473 

we may believe the newspapers of the day, were such as could not 
be adequately expressed by shouts. Some natural tears were shed. 
In response to the cheers from the street, M. Genet turned to a win- 
dow, and delivered a short but most moving speech to the concourse 
below. The committee then took " an affectionate leave," and all 
the company withdrew "in peace and order;" " every man," adds a 
reporter, " departing with this virtuous and patriotic satisfaction, 
that he had, at once, testified his gratitude to a faithful ally in the 
hour of her distress, and demonstrated his attachment to those 
republican principles which are the basis of the American govern- 
ment." 

The next day Citizen Genet issued a general thanksgiving to the 
people who had greeted him so cordially on his journey. He sent 
also a formal replj' to the citizens' address of the day before. " My 
conduct," he said in this reply, " shall be to the height of our 
national political principles. An unbounded openness shall be the 
constant rule of my intercourse with those wise and virtuous men 
into whose hands you have intrusted the management of your public 
affairs. I will expose candidly to them the great objects on which 
it will be our business to deliberate; and the common interest of 
both nations will, I have no doubt, be the compass of our direction; 
for, without such a guide, what would become of both nations, 
exposed, as we mutually are, to th-e resentment, the hatred, and the 
treachery of all the tyrants of the earth, who, you may rest assured, are 
at this moment armed, not only against France, but against liberty 
itself?" 

This was but the beginning of Philadelphia's entertainment of 
the plenipotentiary. Deputation succeeded deputation ; dinner fol- 
lowed dinner. First, the officers of the French frigate were invited 
to a grand banquet, at which one hundred gentlemen assisted. The 
Marseillaise was sung, of course, all standing, and all joining in the 
chorus. In the midst of the effusive toast-giving, a delegation of 
the "mariners of L'Embuscade " entered the dining-room; for at 
this happy epoch sailors, too, were citizens and even fellow-citizens. 
Such was the "effusion" of the hour, that Philadelphians were seen 
" embracing" the mariners; and then again the whole company 
burst into a patriotic song. A few 'days after. Citizen Borapard 
entertained the Governor of Pennsylvania and a distinguished com- 
pany on board the frigate, with the usual " hymns to liberty " and 



474 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOlSr. 

toashs. Again the mariners bore a part, wliicli a reporter thus 
describes : — 

, " As the American citizens were preparing to leave the frigate, 
Citizen Dupont, tlie boatswain, addressed them in the name of his 
messmates, in a short speech replete with feeling, and nearly as fol- 
lows : ' You see before you your friends the French. Several of us 
have shed their blood to establish your liberty and independence. 
We are willing, if necessary, to shed to the last drop of what 
remains for the maintaining of that freedom, which, like you, we 
have conquered. We are still your good friends and brethren; and, 
if you should again want our assistance, we shall alwaj's be ready to 
give you proofs of our attachment.' The governor answered this 
artless- and energetic address by expressing his most sincere wishes 
for the happiness of the French nation, and the success of the frigate 
L'Embuscade." 

Then came the grandest festival of all, — a banquet to M. Genet, 
attended by two hundred gentlemen, tickets four dollars ! The 
toasts, on this occasion, betray the touch of abler hands than those 
which had penned the sentiments given at the other feasts. If Mr. 
Jefferson did not indite some of these sentences for an anxious com- 
mittee, they certainly bear a strong resemblance to some that occur 
in his writings. The toasts contain the Ilepublican code of the 
period : — 

1. The people and the law. 2. The people of France : may they 
have one head, one heart, and one arm in the support of the right- 
eous cause of liberty ! 3. The people of the United States : may 
liberty only be their idol, and freemen only be their brethren ! 
4. The llepublics of France and America : ma}'' they be forever 
united in tlie cause of liberty ! 5. May principles, and not men, be 
the objects of republican attachment! 6. May France give an exam- 
ple to tlie world, that the balances of a government depend more 
upon knowledge and vigilance than upon a multifarious combination 
of its power ! 7. In complaining of the temporary evils of revolu- 
tions, may we never forget that the greater evils of monarchy and 
aristocracy are perpetual ! 8. The spirit of sevent^'^-six and of ninety- 
two : may the citizens of America and France, as the}' are equal in 
virtue, be egual in success! 9. May true republican simplicity be the 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 475 

only ornament of the magistrate in every elective government ! 
10. Confusion to the councils of the confederated despots, and dismay 
to their hosts : may they never be able to form a centre of union or 
of action ! 11. May France prove a political Hercules, and exter- 
minate the Hydrse of despotism from the earth ! 12. Peace, liberty, 
and independence: may the tyrants and traitors of all countries be 
punished by the establishment of the happiness which tliey wish to 
betray or destroy ! 13. May the systems of the United States be 
entirely their own, and no corrupt exotic be ingrafted upon the tree 
of libert}' ! 14. May the defects of individuals teach us to place our 
hopes of the safety and perpetuity of freedom on the whole body of 
the people ! 15. May the clarion of freedom, sounded by France, 
awaken the people of the world to their own happiness, and the 
tyrants of the earth be prostrated by its triumphant sounds ! 

The reader observes that the toasts are fifteen in number ; the 
recent adinission of Terrrressee -and Kentucky to the Union having 
broken the spell long attached to the number thirteen. He also 
remarks that principles are toasted, not men. The birthday of 
George III. occurring during the same week, there was a banquet 
on that occasion too, the toasts of which seem to have been designed 
as a reply to this remarkable series. This feast derived additional 
eclat from the recent marriage of the English minister, George 
Hammond, to a young lady of Philadelphia. Four Georges were 
toasted, — George III., George, Prince of "Wales, George Wash- 
ington, and George Hammond ; and, to mark the contrast, a neat 
sentiment was offered, more human and more wise than the repub- 
lican ^oast at which it was aimed: "Men and principles: may 
neither be forgotten, if deserving remembrance ! " The other toasts 
were less brilliant than characteristic. One of them was as much 
designed to single out Alexander Hamilton for honor as though he 
had been mentioned by name : " The proclamation of neutrality : 
may the heart that dictated and the head that proposed it live long 
to enjo}^ the blessings of all true friends to humanity ! " Other 
toasts were these: "All good Americans : may moderation be their 
principle, neutrality their resolution, and industry their motto!" 
" The cap of liberty ; but may those who wear it know there is 
another for licentiousness ! " 

In the mere matter of toasts, it must be owned, the republicans 
of 1793 succeeded somewhat better than " the monocrats." For the 



476 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 

moment it seemed as if all pettj' distinctions had melted away in 
the fiery heat of the popular sympathy with France, encompassed, 
as she was, by the armies of conspiring kings. And interesting it 
is to note, that the events, which had united the American people 
in sympatliy with France, had rallied the people of England to 
their king's support. The declaration of war following instantly the 
execution of Louis, appeared to destroy the prestige of the opposi- 
tion, and to give the Tories the command of a congenial mob. 
Thomas Paine, notwithstanding his adroit and courngeous effort to 
rescue France and the republican cause from the dishonor of 2)ntting 
the king to death, became odious in England. It was a kind of fash- 
ion in country towns to burn him in effigy, — a ceremony in which 
the county magnates and municipal officers joined with Sunday 
schools and parish clerg3\ At, Bristol, for example, in February, 
1793, there was a performance of this kind that is worthy of remem- 
brance as a curiosity of human folly. 

"The cavalcade," as the Bristol Journal exultingly relates, "pro- 
ceeded through our principal streets in the following order :. Four 
constables headed about one hundred of the biggest boys from their 
Sunday schools, with colors and banners, having different mottoes, 
as, 'God save the King,' 'Church and King,' 'King and Constitu- 
tion,' ' Sunday Schools,' etc., decorated with blue and orange-colored 
ribbons, and white staves in their hands. Then followed on foot 
many hundreds of colliers, etc., belonging to several friendly socie- 
ties or clubs, with blue cockades in their hats, large, elegant silk 
colors, with their respective devices and mottoes in letters of gold. 
After them followed twelve javelin-men, and the under and' high 
sheriffs on horseback, the horses richly caparisoned. Next came 
the prisoner, seated in a chair, drawn in a coal-cart guarded by 
twenty-four constables, and dressed in a black-trimmed coat, white 
waistcoat, Florentine breeches, white stockings, cocked hat, with a 
French cockade, bag wig, etc. On his right hand stood the D — 1, 
a well-made figure, about six feet high, with his left hand on Paine's 
shoulder, and under his right arm a real fox. On Paine's left hand 
sat a person in a clergyman's habit. The hangman followed on 
horseback with his black axe, amidst the acclamation of such a 
concourse of nobility to bring up the rear as, we believe, was never 
before seen on the like occasion. They made a stand at the 
•Exchange and Custom House, and sung God save the King, then 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 477 

proceeded to a place called Truebody's Hill, in their own parish, 
where the figures were first hung on a gallows near thirty feet high, 
and then burnt." 

All of which was done, the editor states, without eliciting a dis- 
sentient manifestation of any kind. Dr. Priestley, whose house 
had been destroyed, and his library scattered over the land, by a 
Tory mob the year before, now shared with his friend Paine the 
honors of many a scene like that of Bristol. He was discovering 
that Eugland was not a comfortable dwelling-place for a republican. 

All went well with Citizen Genet as long as there was nothing to 
be done but receive enthusiastic deputations, and assist at effusive 
banquets. Those British prizes, too, did-not come amiss. Waging 
war in the sacred cause of liberty is not arduous so long as the sea 
swarms with unwarned prizes, and there are no hard knocks to risk 
in taking them. It was .not until M. Genet read the president's 
proclamation of , neutrality, that he experienced a premonitory 
chill. He thought the president should have waited to hear what 
lies had to communicate before taking a step so decisive. It was at 
Richmond that he read the proclamation ; and Governor Henry Lee 
endeavored to convince him, that, in adopting the policy of neutral- 
ity, the president had served France. Genet seemed to acquiesce ; 
but he thought the safety of the United States depended on the 
success of France in the war. If, said he, the Bourbons are restored, 
the kings of Europe will unite to crush liberty in the United States. 
On his arrival at Philadelphia he heard that the president of the 
United States, a few days before, had gone to the length of admit- 
ting to a private audience two emigres of the most pronounced quali- 
ty, the Vicomte de Noailles and M. Talon. M. de Noailles had 
served in the American war, by the side of Lafayette, under Wash- 
ington's own eye, and had been among the most decided republicans 
in France, until terror had pi'ecipitated the Hevolution into chaos 
and massacre. Then he had resigned his rank in the army, and 
became an emigre. M. Talon had actually assisted the king's 
flight, and escaped to America only after lying in close concealment 
for many weeks. And these men had been admitted to a ^jy^v'ya^e 
audience ! M. Genet was losing his head ; else he would have felt 
how particularly welcome both these gentlemen must have been 
to General Washington, and what a claim one of them had to 
cordial recognition from a president of the United StatQj|^ 



478 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Citizen Genet stood at length in the impassive, and perhaps 
sliglitly austere, presence of General Washington. He observed 
that the room was decorated with what he was pleased to style 
" medallions of Capet and his farailj^," then regarded in France as 
emblematic of the most extreme " re-action." M. Genet, who owed 
his advancement to the favor of " Madame Capet," had reached such 
a pitch of exaltation as to be, as he said afterwards, " extremely 
wounded " at this exhibition. Controlling his feelings, however, the 
plenipotentiary made his bow, and delivered a speech, conceived in a 
stjde of magnanimity which is inexpensive, indeed, but congenial to 
the " Latin " mind. " We know," said he in substance, " that, under 
present circumstances, we have a right to call upon the United States 
for the guaranty of our West India islands. But we do not desire 
it. We wish you to do nothing but what is for your own good, and 
we will do all in our power to promote it. Cherish your own peace 
and prosperity. You have expressed a willingness to enter into a 
more liberal treaty of commerce with us. I bring full powers to form 
such a treaty, and a preliminary decree of the National Convention 
to la}' open our country and its colonies to you for every purpose of 
utility, without your participating in the burden of maintaining and 
defending them. We see in you the only people on earth who can 
love us sincerely, and merit to be by us sincerely loved." 

In short, as Mr. Jefferson remarked at the time, " he offers every 
thing, and asks nothing." The president responded to thjs effusion 
in a manner which was not pleasing to M. Genet. Warmly as he 
spoke of the friendship of the people of the United States for France, 
he said nothing of the Revolution. Not a revolutionary sentiment, 
as M. Genet complained, escaped his lips, " while all the towns from 
Charleston to Philadelphia had made the air resound with their most 
ardent wishes for the French Republic." 

Tiie president may well have been somewhat graver than usual 
during this interview. The spectacle of the British ship Grange, 
with the British colors reversed, and the glorious flag of France flying 
over them, was thrilling to the republicans of Philadelphia ; but Mr. 
Hammond, the British minister, did not find it agreeable. Several 
days before Genet's arrival he had sent in a remonstrance. Many of 
the sweet hours of his honeymoon he was obliged to spend in writing 
memorials and despatches, and in toying with Vattel, Wolf, Grotius, 
and Puff€JJi%)rf. He was a polite but urgent and strenuous diplo- 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 479 

matist ; who, as Mr. Jefferson remarked, " if he did not get an 
answer in three days or a week, would goad a secretary of state with 
anotlier letter." He demanded the surrender of the Grange to her 
owners. He objected to the proceedings of M. Genet, and required 
the surrender of all the prizes taken in consequence of those proceed- 
ings. He complained that a French agent was buying arms for 
France in the United States. These demands had been most anx- 
iously considered by the president, and debated in the cabinet by 
Hamilton and Jefterson with a warmth and pertinacity worthy of 
the importance of the crisis. A crisis we may well stjde it ; for, in 
truth, the independence of an infant nation was never so menaced 
as that of the United States was then, and the moral questions 
involved presented real difficulties. The passion of the country was 
to help France ; but that involved war with two j)owers, each of 
which had the United States at a disadvantage. England retained 
the seven posts, and was mistress of the sea. Spain held Florida 
and the mouth of the Mississipj:*!, which gave her ascendency over 
the Creek Indians, the most numerous, powerful, and warlike system 
of tribes in North America. As the ancient alliance between France 
and Spain had been dynastic only, not national, the Revolution had 
dissolved it, and thrown Spain into the coalition of kings. The 
Creeks were already threatening the frontiers. The mouth of the 
Mississippi, never too wide open for the convenience of Kentuckians, 
showed symptoms of closing tight to American commerce ; and the 
tone of the Spanish government in its intercourse with that of the 
United States was such as usually precedes the invention of a pre- 
text for open hostility. 

In these circumstances President Washington could see but one 
Course, which was sanctioned both by prudence and morality, — 
absolute neutrality. The country was shut up to that policy. The 
government could not be said to have a choice ; because, even if it 
had been shown that the United States were morally bound to help 
France in her dire and pitiable extremity, it was manifest that the 
United States were powerless to do so by arms. No man saw this 
more clearly than Jefferson. The difference between him and Ham- 
ilton was this : Hamilton's sympathies were wholly and warmly with 
the coalition of kings, and Jefferson's with the French people. Both 
accepted neutrality as a necessity of the case, and both with reluc- 
tance : Hamilton because he longed to help England ; arJjjJfefferson, 



480 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

because he yearned to help France. In every question that came up, 
therefore, Jeiferson desired to do as much, and Hamilton as little, to 
oblige and gratify France, as Vattel, the treaties, and eternal justice 
would permit. Between them sat Washington, a just man, who 
Leccaise his inclination was toward France, was all the more on his 
guard against any influence favoring that side. 

First Question. — Shall we give up the ship Grange? Yes; 
because she was taken when lying at anchor off Cape Henlojoen, 
within the jurisdiction of the United States. Genet was requested 
to surrender her accordingly. 

Second Question. — Is it right and lawful for our citizens to sell 
arms to agents of France ?" It is. They may sell to either power. 
"Our citizens," wrote Jefferson to Hammond, "have always been 
free to make, vend, and export arms. It is the constant occupation 
and livelihood of some of them. To suppress tlieir callings, the only 
means perliaps of their subsistence, because there is a war existing 
in foreign and distant countries, in which we have no concern, would 
scarcely be expected. It would be hard in principle and impossible 
in practice." But if any of these American arms are taken on their 
way to a belligerent port, the American vender has no redress. 

Third Question. — May privateers be fitted out, manned, or 
commissioned in American ports? Decidedly not. No citizen of 
the United States may enlist under either flag. Besides the duty 
we owe to other nations, " our wish to preserve the morals of our citi- 
zens from being vitiated by courses of lawless plunder and murder" 
would induce us to use all j)roper means to prevent this " with good 
faith, fervor, and vigilance." 

Fourth Question. — Well, then, ought we to surrender the 
prizes which Genet's Charleston privateers have brought in ? On 
this point the difference between Hamilton and Jefferson was irrecon- 
cilable. Hamilton thought that the commissioning of those vessels 
by Genet was an affront and a wrong to tlie United States, for which 
apology and reparation should be demanded from Fi-ance. It was his 
opinion also, that, since the jjrivateers were unlawfully commissioned, 
the captures were unlawful, and should be restored by the United 
States. Jefferson contended, that, although Genet's conduct toward 
the United States was improper, yet he had a right to issue commis- 
sions totf»Lvateers. Genet had done a right thing in a wrong place. 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 481 

Tbe commissions, therefove, were valid, notwithstanding the offencft 
against the United States ; and hence tlie captures were hiwful, and 
might be retained. Edmund Randolph, the attorney-general, gave 
an ingenious opinion, to this effect: The French may lawfully sell 
their prizes, but the privateers themselves cannot remain in Ameri- 
can ports. They must be ordered awa}^, not to return to the United 
States ''until they should have been to the dominions of their own 
sovereign, and thereby purged the illegality of tlieir origin." This 
opinion was the one which the president adopted. Genet was noti- 
fied of the President's conclusion, and informed that he was expected 
to act in accordance therewith. The prizes he might sell, but the 
privateers he must order away. 

Fifth Question. — M. Genet asked, as a favor to his belea- 
guered country, that the United States should advance some instal- 
ments of its debt to France, which he proposed to send home in the 
form of produce. Hamilton advised that this request be bluntly 
refused, without a word of explanation. Jefferson's opinion was, 
that the request should be complied with so far as it could be done 
lawfully; and if it could not be done lawfully, then tlie refusal 
should be explained so far as it could be without compromising the 
credit of the United States. It was found that the debt could not 
be advanced without violating both the letter and the spirit of the 
law; that is, without borrowing at six per cent to pay a debt at five. 
Mr. Jefferson's advice was followed. 

M. Genet was shocked and amazed at the course of the adminis- 
tration. His reception had bewildered him. Though belonging to 
a nation given to "demonstrations," he was as completely deceived 
as Kossuth was ; and he was the more misled because he had just 
come from a country where the people and the government had been, 
for years belligerent powers. The United States, he concluded, had 
a Capet! Interpreting America by the light of France, he fell 
naturally into the delusion, that though he was, as a matter of form, 
accredited to the president of the United States, yet it was with the 
people of .the United States, the Sovereign People, that he really 
had to do. The ship Grange, indeed, he gave up, though not with- 
out a wry face, nor without making a merit of the act. When, 
however, Mr. Jefferson informed him that he was expected to send 
away the privateers to purge the illegality of their origin, he merely 
shrieked. And yet there was some method in his shriek. ^,. It was a 
31 J| 



482 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

shriek of insulting defiance which alone would have justified the 
president ia asking his recall. 

*'If," wrote Genet, "our merchant vessels or others are not 
allowed to arm themselves, when the French alone are resisting the 
league of tj^rants against the liberty of the people, they will be 
exposed to inevitable ruin in going out of the ports of the United 
States, which is certainlj'- not the intention of the people of Ameri- 
ca. Their fraternal voice has resounded from every quarter around 
me, and their accents are not equivocal; they are as pure as the 
hearts by whom they are expressed ; and the more they have 
touched my sensibility, the more I wish, sir, that the Federal gov-, 
ernment should observe as far as in their power the public engage- 
ments contracted by both nations ; and that by this conduct, they 
will give, at least to the world, the example of a true neutrality, 
which does not consist in the cowardly ahandonment of their 
friends in the moment when danger menaces them, but in adhering 
strictly, if they can do no better, to the obligations they have con- 
tracted with them." 

And soon after, when he learned that two Americans who had 
gone privateering in the Citizen Genet were in prison awaiting 
trial for the offence, he shrieked again. The crime laid to their 
charge, he said, was one which his pen almost refused to state, and 
which the mind could not conceive. Their crime was serving 
France, and "defending with her children the common glorious 
cause of liberty." With both treaties open before him, he declared, 
and kept declaring, that the United States were bound by treaty to 
permit the equipping of ^Jrivateers in American ports, and to allow 
all citizens who chose to take service in them. There is not a 
word in either treaty which gives support to the position. 

This was bad diplomacy, even for a tyro ; nor did it promote any 
of M. Genet's objects. Mr. Hammond might well congratulate 
himself upon having such a competitor. The president's conduct, 
on this occasion, would have been exquisite art, if it had not been 
simple truth and fidelity. After listening to many a hot discussion 
in the cabinet between Jefferson and Hamilton on the questions of 
international law at issue, he resolved to refer the whole subject of 
the rights and duties of neutrals, and the true interpretation of the 
French treaties, to the judges of the Supreme Court, summoned 
expressly for that purpose. Twenty-nine questions were drawn up 



EDMOND GEiSTET IN" THE UNITED STATES. 483 

for tlieir consideration, which covered the whole field of inquiry. 
But, as the solution of so many problems would take time, the 
entire fleet of privateers and prizes, seven vessels in all, were 
ordered not to depart, "till the further order of the president." 
M. Genet would have done better to sell his prizes while he could. 

"Never, in my opinion," wrote Jefferson to Madison, July 8, 
1793, " was so calamitous an appointment as that of the present 
minister of France here. Hot-headed, all imagination, no judg- 
ment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent toward the 
president, in his written as well as his verbal communications, 
before Congress or the public they will excite indignation. He 
renders my position immensely difficult. He does me' justice per- 
sonally; and, giving him time to vent himself and become more cool, 
I am on a footing to advise him freely, and he respects it ; but he 
will break out again on the very first occasion, so that he is incapa- 
ble of correcting himself" 

When these words were written. Citizen Genet was "breaking 
out" in a manner unexampled in the annals of diplomacy. Not by 
words onl}^, but by an open and unequivocal act, he had resolved to 
defy the administration ! Among the prizes captured by L'Embus- 
cade was a vessel named the Little Sarah, then lying in the Dela- 
ware, within a mile or two of the president's house. After having 
been most distinctly and at great length informed by Mr. Jefferson, 
officially, that no vessel could lawfully be equipped in a port of the 
United States for a purpose hostile to a nation at peace with the 
United States, M. Genet changed the name of the Little Sarah to 
Le Petit Deraocrate, jjierced her for fourteen guns, armed and 
equipped her for a cruise, placed on board of her a crew of one 
hundred and twenty men, and was about to send her to sea. This 
act was the more flagrant because it was done while the president 
was absent at Mount Vernon. Colonel Hamilton, who was the first 
officer of the government to discover the project, caused the gover- 
nor of Pennsylvania to be notified. Governor Mifilin, Eepublican 
as he was, gave orders on the instant (it was late Saturday evening, 
July 6) to call out a body of militia to prevent the Little Democrat 
from sailing. The secretary of the State of Pennsylvania, Mr. G. 
J. Dallas, another Eepublican, suggested, that perhaps M. Genet 
would be found accessible to reason, if he were approached in a 
friendly spirit. Before summoning the militia, therefore, Mr. 



484 LIFE OF THOJIAS JEFFERSOK. 

Dallas was requested to try the effect of argument and persuasion 
upon the mind of the plenipotentiary. 

M. Genet and Mr. Dallas met at eleven o'clock on Saturday even- 
ing, at M. Genet's house. They talked till midnight, or, rather, 
M. Genet stormed till midnight. He utterly refused to detain the 
vessel, ending with these words : " I hope no attempt to seize her 
will be made ; for, as she belongs to the republic, she must defend 
the honor of her flag, and will certainly repel force by force." 

Early on Sunday morning Mr. Jefferson, at his house on the 
Schuylkill, received a despatch from the governor to the effect that 
the vessel was to sail that day, and requesting him to detain her at 
least until the president's return, which was expected on Wednes- 
day. An hour or two later Mr. Jefferson was at Genet's house, 
listening to a repetition of the tempest with which Mr. Dallas had 
been favored the night before. But Jefferson knew his man. "I 
found it necessary," he records, " to let him go on, and, in fact, 
could do no otherwise ; for the few efforts which I made to take some 
part in the conversation were quite ineffectual." The storm showed, 
at last, some signs of abating, when the angry diplomatist said that 
as soon as the president arrived he meant to ask him to convene 
Congress. Mr. Jefferson availed himself of the lull to give him a 
little elementary instruction in the nature of constitutional govern- 
ment. He explained to him how it was that Congress could have 
no voice in the questions which had arisen, since thej'- belonged to 
the executive department of the government. " If Congress were 
sitting," said the secretary of state, " they would take no notice of 
them." " Is not Congress the sovereign ? " asked Genet. " No," 
replied Jefferson : "Congress is sovereign in making laws only; the 
executive is sovereign in executing them, and the judiciary in con- 
struing them when they relate to their department." " But," said 
Genet, "at least Congress is bound to see that the treaties are 
observed," Again Mr. Jefferson set him right. No, said he, the 
president is to see that treaties are observed. " If," asked Genet, 
" he decides against a treaty, to whom is a nation to appeal ? " 
"The Constitution," replied Jefferson, "has made the president the 
last appeal." 

This idea, which was new to l;he plenipotentiary, seemed to him 
utterly preposterous. He bowed to Mr. Jefferson, and said that he 
" would not make him his compliments upon such a Constitution ! " 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. , 485 

He expressed the utmost astonisliment at it ; and the contemplation 
of such an absurdity was so amusing as to restore him to good- 
humor. Mr. Jefferson seized the happy moment to expostulate with 
him on the impropriety of his conduct. Genet took it in good part. 
"But," said he, '^ I have a right to expound the treaty on our side ! " 
" Certainly," replied Jefferson, "each party has an equal right to 
expound their treaties. You, as the agent of your nation, have a 
right to bring forward your exposition, to support it by reasons, to 
insist on it, to be answered with reasons for our exposition where it 
is contrary ; but when, after hearing and considering j'^our reasons, 
the highest authority in the nation has decided, it is 3'our duty to say 
you think the decision wrong, that you cannot take upon yourself to 
admit it, and will represent it to your government to do as they 
think proper; but, in the mean time, you ouglit to acquiesce in it, 
and to do nothing within our limits contrary to it." 

M. Genet, inexperienced as he was in the diplomatic art, could 
not object to this statement. His silence appearing to give assent, 
Mr. Jefferson came to the point, and pressed him to detain the Little 
Democrat till the president's return, " Why detain her ? " asked 
Genet. "Because," replied Jefferson, "she is reported to be armed 
with guns acquired here." No, said Genet, the guns are all French 
property. Mr. Jefferson, however, insisted that the vessel should 
not sail, and said that her departure " would be considered a very 
serious offence." After some hesitation, M. Genet, partly by words, 
partly by look and gesture, intimated to Mr. Jefferson tliat the Little 
Democrat, not being yet ready for sea, would not sail till the presi- 
dent's return. " But," said he, " she is to change her position, and fall 
down the river to day." " What," asked Jefferson, " will she fall 
down to the lower end of the town ? " M. Genet's reply was : " I do 
not know exactly where, but somewhere there for the convenience of 
getting ready some things; but let me beseech you not to permit any 
attempt to put men on board of her. She is filled v^nth high-spirited 
patriots, and they will unquestionably resist ; and there is no occasion, 
for I tell you site will not he ready to depart, for some time." 

Mr. Jefferson said he would then take it for granted that the 
vessel would not be ready before the president's return ; and, in the 
mean time, the government would make inquiries into the facts of her 
armament, for the president's information. He immediately reported 
this conversation to the governor, who dismissed the militia called 
out in the morning. 



486 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

The next day there was a cabinet meeting on the subject at the 
State House, the governor having asked advice as to tlie steps he 
should take in the absence of the president. The governor informed 
the secretaries that two of the Little Democrat's new cannon had 
been, as he had good ground for believing, bought in Philadelphia. 
Colonel Hamilton and General Knox advised that a battery should 
be thrown up on Mud Island, and manned by militia ; and, if the 
vessel should attempt to leave before the pleasure of the president 
should be known, she should be prevented by force. Jefferson dis- 
sented. He dissented strongly ; and he has left us the reasons of his 
dissent, expressed with a blending of dignity and i:)assion, of lawyer- 
like coolness and philanthropic fire, which speak to us both of the 
man and the time. He was satisfied, he said, that the vessel would 
not sail until the arrival of the president, who was known to be but 
forty-eight hours distant ; and it was not respectful to him to resort 
to a measure so unusual and so extreme, when he was so near at 
hand. The erection of the battery, too, vi^ould probably cause the 
departure it would be designed to jirevent ; and the vessel would 
sail, after having added blood to the other causes of exasperation. 
Blood usually closed the hearts of men and nations to peace. 
Besides, a French fleet of twenty men-of-war and a hundred and 
fifty merchant vessels was hourly expected in the Delaware : it might 
arrive at the scene of blood in time to join in it. And if the Little 
Democrat should sail to-day, how easily we could explain the matter 
to the belligerents ! How capable of demonstration our innocence ! 
And suppose there are fifteen or twenty Americans on board of her: 
are there not ten times as many Americans on board English vessels, 
impressed in foreign ports ? Are we as ready and disposed to sink 
British ships in our harbors as we are to fire upon this French ^ssel 
for a breach of neutrality far less atrocious ? How inconsistent for 
a nation, which has been patiently bearing for ten years the grossest 
insults and injuries from their late enemies, to rise at a feather 
against tlieir friends and benefactors ; and that, too, at a moment 
when circumstances have knit their hearts together in a bond of the 
most ardent affection ! And how monstrous to begin a quarrel by 
an act of war ! England wrongs us deeply and essentially ; we 
negotiate ; we submit to the outrage of her insolent silence ; but let 
one excited Frenchman do us an injury wliich his government would 
instantly disavow, and we are ready to precipitate a war ! 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 487 

" I would not/' said Jefferson, " gratify the combination of kings 
witli the spectacle of the only two republics on earth destroying 
each other for two cannon ; nor would I, for infinitely greater cause, 
add this country to that combination, turn the scale of contest, and 
let it be from our hands that the hopes of man received their last 
stab." 

The battery was not erected upon Mud Island. The Little Dem- 
ocrat dropped down the river as far as Chester, where she lay at 
anchor until the president's return to the seat of government. As 
soon as the president could master the facts of the situation, he 
caused M. Genet to be informed, that, since all the questions in dis- 
pute were referred to the judges, ''it was expected" that the Little 
Democrat, as well as the other prizes and privateers, would remain 
where thej'' were until further notice. "Within three days after the 
date of this communication Le Petit Democrate put to sea. It was 
then that the administration, formally and distinctly assuming the 
responsibility of all the damage she might do the belligerents, 
adopted the doctrine of international obligation which has recently 
been applied, with such happy and hopeful results, to the case of the 
Alabama. Mr. Jefferson officially notified M. Genet, that, in case 
the Little Democrat made any prizes, the government of the United 
States held itself bound to restore the same or to compensate the 
owners, " the indemnification to be reimbursed by the French 
nation." 

M. Genet behaved like a man who has crossed the Rubicon, and 
means to press on to mastery or destruction. It was evident that 
he was bent upon fully executing his threat of appealing to the 
people. Besides assisting to form Jacobin clubs in the Atlantic 
cities, distributing considerable sums of money for the purpose ; 
besides organizing a troop of mounted Frenchmen with whom he 
paraded Philadelphia on festive days; besides playing other pranks 
of the same histrionic nature, — he continued to defy and frustrate 
the government in its resolve to hold the balance even between the 
warring powers. Other vessels, in New York and Baltimore, he 
was getting ready for cruising in quest of British prizes. He was 
still intent upon organizing an expedition in Kentucky for an 
attempt upon New Orleans ; and this in the teeth of Mr. Jefferson's 
emphatic notification, that "his enticing men and officers in Ken- 
tucky to go against Spain was putting a halter 'around their necks." 



488 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

This Kentucky scheme of Genet's was set on foot at the very 
moment when it seemed as if Spain was only waiting for a pretext 
to declare war against tlie United States. Jefferson's famous 
despatch to Madrid, the most energetic of all his oflScial papers, in 
which he warned Spain to let the Creeks alone, was crossing the 
ocean at the time. Never hefore, never since, has the government 
of the United States taken a firmer or loftier tone than at this 
threatening crisis. "We confide in our strength," wrote Mr. Jef- 
ferson, " without boasting of it ; we respect that of others without 
fearing it. If we cannot otherwise prevail on the Creeks to dis- 
continue their depredations, we will attack them in force. If Spain 
chooses to consider our defence against savage butchery as a cause 
of war to her, we must meet her also in war, with regret, but with- 
out fear ; and we shall be happier, to the last moment, to repair 
with her to the tribunal of peace and reason." What a time was 
this for Citizen Genet to be, not merely fomenting war with Spain, 
but preparing to wage war by attacking a Spanish j)ost ! 

All cabinet questions were now merged into one, — What shall 
we do with Genet? "Send him out of the country," said robust 
Knox at the cabinet meeting of August 1, when this dreadful 
question was first discussed. " Publish the whole correspondence," 
said Hamilton, "with a statement of his proceedings, thus anticipat- 
ing him in his threatened appeal to the people." Jefferson's advice, 
supported warmly by Eandolph, was this : To send a history of his 
doings in America, with copies of the letters between Genet and 
himself, to the French government, and request, with all the delicacy 
possible, the recall of Genet. For two days the subject was de- 
bated with a heat and passion unexampled ; Hamilton twice harang- 
uing his audience of four individuals for three-quarters of an H^r, 
in a manner, as Jefferson reports, "as inflammatory and declamatory 
as if he had been speaking to a jury." He dwelt upon the new 
Jacobin Society just formed in Philadelphia, on the model of the 
dread club to which Robespierre owed his power. The publication 
of Genet's letters, Hamilton thought, would crush this terrible 
organization. Jefferson, on the contrary, thought that the club 
would die out of itself if it were only let alone: opposition alone 
could give it undue importance. 

The president was, like Othello, "perj)lexed in the extreme." If 
we may believe the exaggerating memory of Mr. John Adams, a 



EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 489 

vast multitude of the noisier part of the population of Philadelphia 
sided with Genet at this moment. Years after we find him writing 
to Jefferson of the terror of 1793, when " ten thousand people in 
the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Wash- 
ington out of his house, and effect a revohition in the government, 
or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and 
against England." The Republican newspapers, too, were all that 
Genet could have wished. The president w^as no longer spared, 
either in prose or verse ; and there was even a burlesque poem in 
which he was represented as being brought to the guillotine. At 
one of these cabinet meetings, irritated by Knox reminding him 
of this pasquinade, he lost his self-control for a moment. Voltaire 
wickedly remarks tljat Newton "consoled" mankind for his unap- 
proachable supremacy in the realm of science by coming at last to 
write on the Prophecies. George Washington occasionallj' solaced 
the self-love of his admiring friends by getting into a good honest 
passion, like an ordinary mortal. Bursting into speech, he defied 
any man to" produce a single act of his since he had been in the 
government which was not done from the purest motives. He 
declared that he had never repented but once of liaving slipped the 
moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. 
"By God!" he exclaimed, using the familiar oath of the period, "I 
would rather be >n my grave than in my present situation ! I would 
rather be on my farm than be made emperor of the world ; and yet 
tliey are charging me with wanting to be a king!" That rascal 
Freneau, he continued, sent him three of his papers every day, as 
if he would become their distributor ; and he could see nothing in 
this but an impudent design to insult him. 

Hftppy the mortal wlio has no worse fault than a rare outburst of 
legitimate and harmless anger ! It was embarrassing to get back 
to the question after this explosion. The subject was, however, 
resumed ; ^nSTihe president decided to follow Mr. Jefferson's advice, 
of appealing to the French government; and asking Genet's recall, 
reserving the expedient of appealing to the American people to a 
later day. With all the discretion conceivable, and with a most 
happy mixture of frankness, friendliness, and decision, the secretary 
of state performed this difficult duty. In due time M. Genet was 
recalled, and his proceedings were disavowed ; but France was a long 
way off in 179.3, and some months elapsed before the letter of recall 



490 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEBSON. 

reached the plenipotentiary. In the mean time he continued his 
course of reckless defiance. He executed his threat of appealing to 
the people, by publishing a portion of his official correspondence 
with Mr. Jefferson ; and the people, with a near approach to unani- 
mity, condemned him. 

This summer of delirium at Philadelphia ended in the panic and 
desolation of the yellow fever, from which every member ctf the 
government fled, Jefferson last of all. In New York, where' M. 
Genet then resided, love softened his heart, and assisted to restore 
serenity to his mind. Miss Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of that 
stanch Republican chief, George Clinton, governor of the State of 
New York, was the young lady to whom he paid his court; and 
paid it with such success, that, when he received his recall, he 
married her, and settled in the State. He spent there the r£st of 
his days, a good citizen, a worthy gentleman, though never quite 
able to understand how it was that the American people cherished 
such veneration for the character of their first pre'Sident. Every 
thing would have gone well with his mission, he thought, had it 
not been for the invincible resolution of President Washington. He 
died at Jamaica, Long Island, in 1834, after contributing much to 
agricultural improvement and the progress of science. His virtues 
were his own ; his errors were those of the time in which he was 
called upon to act. 



CHAPTEE LI. 

JEFFERSON RESIGNS, AND RETIRES TO MONTICELLO. 

Meanwhile Jefferson was longing for retreat with ever-growing 
desire. Hamilton, too, wearied of the vain effort to maintain two 
families upon his little salary, had made up his mind to return to 
the New York bar, and only remained for a while longer, like Jef- 
ferson, in compliance with Washington's earnest entreaty. Hamil- 
ton, however, was not so painfully situated as his colleague, for he had 
society on his side. The people he oftenest met approved his course 
and valued his character. Jefferson had few adherents among the 
rich and the educated. It is only the human race in general that is 
the gainer by the ideas of which he was the exponent. Classes may 
be benefited, or may think themselves benefited, by abuses, by 
privilege, by " protection," by " caste ; " and those classes often 
know enough to flatter and retain the occasional gifted men, — the 
Cannings, the Peels, the Hamiltons, — whom birth, breeding, or 
circumstances throw in their way. Pair play and equal rights are 
the common and eternal interest of human nature. No man has 
ever been so loved in the United States, or loved so long, as 
Thomas Jefferson was by those who had no interest apart from this 
common interest, and no hope or desire except to share the common 
lot of man. But the elegant class of Philadelphia in 1793 held 
him in aversion ; for the commerce of the United States, by which 
they were chiefly sustained, was in British hands. Genet was war- 
ring upon that commerce, and Jefferson had to share the odium of 
his irrepressible zeal. His letters to Madison and Monroe of this 
year show us that he felt acutely the alienation of the people around 
him, and saw, too, how powerless he was to stem the tide of re- 
action which the guillotine in France and Genet in America had 
caused. 

491 



492 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

" Tlie motion of my blood," he wrote to Madison in June, 1793, 
''no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world. It leads me 
to seek for happiness in the lap and love of my family, in the society 
of my neighbors and my books, in the wholesome occupations of my 
farm and my affairs, in an interest or affection in every bud that 
opens, in every breath that blows around me, in an entire freedom 
of rest, of motion, of thought, owing account to mj'-self alone of my 
hours and actions. What must be the principle of that calculation 
which should balance against these the circumstances of my present 
existence, — worn down with labors from morning to night, and day 
to day, knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to 
mj'self ; committed singly in desperate and eternal contest against a 
host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and 
prosperity; even the rare hours of relaxation sacrificed to the society 
of persons in the same intentions, of whose hatred I am conscious 
even in those moments of conviviality when the heart wishes most 
to open itselt to the effusions of friendship and confidence; cut off 
from my family and friends, my aftairs abandoned to chaos and 
derangement; in short, giving every thing I love in exchange for 
every thing I hate, and all this without a single gratification in 
possession or prospect, in present enjoyment or future wish." 

All his confidential letters of 1793 are in this tone. But, as often 
as he alluded to the necessity under which he rested of retiring, 
General Washington urged him to remain with such importunity 
that he knew not how to resist. When the president discovered 
that he could not prevail, he begged him at least to defer his resig- 
nation ; for, said he, "like a man going to the gallows, I am willing 
to put it off as long as I can." Jefferson remained in office through 
the year. " Yesterday," he wrote to his daughter, December 22, 
1793, "the president made what I hope will be the last set at me to 
continue ; but in this I am now immovable by any considerations 
whatever." So, indeed, it proved. He could not continue without 
ruin; and such was the urgency of the case, that his going home 
did but postpone the catastrophe. The president accepted his resig- 
nation January 1, 1794. " The opinion," wrote General Washing- 
ton on this occasion, "which I had formed of your integrity and 
talents, and which dictated your original nomination, has been con- 
firmed by the fullest experience, and both hate been eminently dis- 



* JEFFEESON EETIEES TO MONTICELLO. 493 

played in tlie discharge of j'^our duty." Five days after lie was on 
his way to IMonticello, having held the post of secretary of state 
two months less than four years. 

Strange to relate, he went out of office in a blaze of glory, to 
which even the fine ladies and gentlemen of the ''Eepublican court" 
were not wholly insensible. When Congress met, the correspond- 
ence between Thomas Jefferson and the two plenipotentiaries, 
George Hammond and Edmond Genet, was published in a massive 
pamphlet. The intense interest of the public in the recent trans- 
actions, now fully disclosed for the first time, caused this collection 
to be widely disseminated and most eagerly scanned. "What candid 
person has ever read that correspondence without enjoying Jeffer- 
son's part of it? It shows him at his best. His singular diligence 
and skill in gathering information were happily displayed ; and all 
men saw that he had never — not in a single phrase — gratified his 
feelings as a man at the expense of his duty as a public officer. It 
was evident that he distinguished between France and her plenipo- 
tentiary, and that he did not withdraw his sympathy from that" dis- 
tracted nation at the moment of her extreraest need. And whatever 
wrath may have swelled within him at the conduct of the English 
government toward his country'', he preserved always the conciliatory 
tone which renders easy the adoption of a worthier policy. The 
people of the United States appreciated the merit of his despatches, 
and many of them recognized the difficulties which so warm a parti- 
san as he must have overcome in producing them. His opponents, 
as we are informed by the most respectable of them all. Chief Jus- 
tice Marshall, were conciliated for the moment. Their prejudices 
were "dissipated." They even flattered themselves, while under the 
spell of his benign and large intelligence, that the sentiments which 
Hamilton, their idol, had contested and reviled in the cabinet were 
their own ! " The partiality for France," says Marshall, in his 
Life of Washington, '' that was conspicuous through the whole of 
the correspondence, detracted nothing from its merit in the opinion 
of the friends of the administration, because, however decided their 
determination to support their own government in a controversy 
with any nation whatever, they felt all the partialities for that 
republic which the correspondence expressed. The hostility of his 
enemies, therefore, was, for a time, considerably lessened, without a 
corresponding diminution of the attachment of his friends." 



494 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 

Genet might have destroyed the Eepublican party, if the Eepub- 
lican chief had not, with so much tact and right feehng, repudiated 
the plenipotentiary while conciliating France. The re-action of the 
following years no man could have prevented. The re-action was 
necessary. France had torn down, without having acquired the 
ability to construct. Not a community on earth was yet ripe for 
the republican system, except that of the American States, wherein 
a majority of the people were accessible through their understand- 
ings. It was necessary for Christendom to wait another century 
before resuming revolution at the point where the Terror inter- 
rupted it in 1792. 

In reading the records of those years, we discover in Jefferson 
some human foibles, some morbidness, some impatience with virtu- 
ous stupidity, some misinterpretation of men and events. He did 
not, indeed, misconceive the Federalists as grossly as they misrepre- 
sented him ; and yet he did misconceive them. On one occasion, 
when he was attributing to some of them an intention to avail them- 
selves of the first opportunity to convert the government into some- 
thing like monarchy, Washington set him right in half a dozen 
words : Desires there inay he, but not designs. This we now know 
was the truth ; but we know, also, how easily desires become designs ; 
and we know the contempt and utter distrust in which the leading 
Federalists of the day held the republican system which Jefferson 
loved, and which is evidently destined to govern the world. We 
know that Hamilton passed the remaining years of his life await- 
ing the crisis which should call him to contend in arms for the ideas 
which he vainly struggled for in the cabinet and the Convention. 

Jefferson was clear in his great office, and he lived up to his great 
-principles. Being asked by a neighbor to write something that 
should help him into Congress, Jefferson said, " From a very early 
moment of my life, I determined never to intermeddle with elections 
by the people, and have invariably adhered to this determination." 
Much as he loved his old friend and secretary, William Short, he 
would not assist him to sell the little public stock which he possessed, 
saying, " I would do any thing my duty would permit ; but were I 
to advise 3'our agent (who is himself a stock-dealer) to sell out yours 
at this or that moment, it would be used as a signal to guide specu- 
lation." Invited to share in a promising speculation, he declined, on 
the ground that a public man should preserve his mind free from all 



JEFFEESON EETIEES TO MONTICELLO. 495 

possible bias of interest. When the fugitives from the St. Domingo 
massacre arrived in 1793, destitute and miserable, he wrote to Mon- 
roe : " JSTever was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of 
man. I deny the power of the general government to apply money 
to svich a purpose, but I deny it with a bleeding heart. It belongs 
to the State governments. Pray urge ours to be liberal." In his 
French package came one day a letter from the wife of a groom in 
the stables of the Duke of Orleans in Paris, addressed to her sister, 
a poor woman who lived fifteen miles from Monticello. Pie was care- 
ful to enjoin it upon his daughter, not merely to forward the letter, 
but to send it to the woman's house by a special messenger. 

We observe, too, that he still looked wistfully to the unexplored 
West. As a member of the Philosophical Society, he took the lead 
in 1792 in raising a thousand guineas to send Andrew Michaud to 
grope his way across the continent, and find out all he could of the 
great plains and rivers, the Indians and the animals, the bones of 
the mammoth, and whatever else a Philosophical Society and an 
American people might care to know. Andrew Michaud did not 
find the Pacific Ocean ; and the task remained undone till Jefferson, 
ten years later, found the predestined man in Meriwether Lewis, a 
son of one of his Albemarle ueishbors. 



CHAPTEE LIL 

ARRIVAL OF DB. PRIESTLEY IN" THE UN^ITED STATES. 

Time brings its revenges. I read, in a recent number of the Lon- 
don Athenaeum, a quiet advertisement informing the public that "it 
is proposed to honor the memory of Dr. Priestley, and to commem- 
orate his discoveries, and his services to the scientific world, by the 
erection of a statue in Birmingham, where he lived so many years." 

The advertisement goes on to say, that, as no other public memo- 
rial of Dr. Priestley exists, it is believed that a large number of per- 
sons interested in science will be glad to contribute something to 
perpetuate the memory "of the father of Pneumatic Chemistry, the 
discoverer of oxj^gen, and one of the most illustrious men of science 
whom the last century produced." Then follows a list of sixty-six 
subscriptions, varying in amount from fifty pounds to ten sliillingg. 
Among the names we recognize those of Professor Huxley, Mr. 
Martineau, Dr. Russell, Sir Eowland Hill, and several other members 
of the Roj'al Society. 

A statue to Priestley in Birmingham I Does the reader happen 
to remember how Dr. Priestley left Birmingham eighty years 
ago? July the 14th, 1791, some of the liberal people of that city 
proposed to celebrate by a public dinner the anniversary of the 
destruction of the Bastille, which had taken place two years before. 
But two years in revolutionary times is equal to a century. When 
the Bastille was destroj^ed, in 1789, the event was hailed with joy 
throughout the world ; but, during the two j-ears following, the revo- 
lutionists of Paris had committed excesses which had repelled and 
disheartened all but the stanchest friends of liberty, — all but such 
as Priestley, who was recognized in Birmingham as a chief and rep- 
resentative of the liberal part3^ Priestley had published a reply to 
the Reflections of Edmund Burke. He had been named a citi- 

496 



AERIVAL OF DE. PRIESTLEY. 497 

zen of the French Republic. He had defended the Eevolution in 
the local press. 

The aristocratic faction of Birmingham, whose instinct was then, 
and is now, to advance their cause by violence, determined to prevent 
the celebration. It is easy to stir up a riot in times of popular 
excitement, but it is not so easy to limit or check its ravages. After 
breaking up the banquet, and destroying the tavern in which it was 
given, the mob rushed to the house of Priestley, who had not 
attended the dinner, broke it open, and compelled the family to seek 
safety in flight. The rioters took out his books in armfuls, — those 
precious books, the solace of his life, which he had been fifty years 
in gathering, for he was a hoarder of books from his infancy. His 
library was scattered over the road for half a mile, and his torn man- 
uscripts covered the floors of his house. His apparatus was broken to 
pieces ; and, when the destruction of the interior was complete, the 
house was set on fire. The fire, however, was extinguished before 
further harm wg,s done. 

This disaster, strange to relate, made the philosopher's fortune ; for 
although the jury, after a trial of nine years, awarded him but 
twenty-five hundred pounds damages, of his claim of more than 
four thousand, the liberal portion of the public subscribed handsome- 
ly to make good his loss. His own brother-in-law, as Lord Brough- 
am tells us, gave him ten thousand pounds, besides settling upon 
him an annuity of two hundrjed pounds for life. As he already had 
a pension of one hundred and fifty pounds a year from Lord Shel- 
burne, whose librarian he had formerly been, he was now in very 
liberal circumstances for a philosopher. In Pennsylvania, where he 
spent the residue of his life, such an income, at that period, was even 
superabundant. 

There is an error in the advertisement quoted above. It is not 
true, that no " public memorial " of Dr. Priestlej' has been erected. 
Every soda-fountain is his monument ; and we all know how nu- 
merous and how splendid they are. Every fountain, too, whence flows 
the home-made water of Vichy and Kissingen is a monument to 
Priestley ; for it was he who discovered the essential portions of the 
process by which all such waters are made. The misfortune is, how- 
ever, that, of the millions of human beings who quaff the cool and 
sparkling soda, not one in a thousand would know what name to 
pronounce, if he were called upon to drink to the memory of the 

32 



498 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

inventor. And really his invention of soda-water is a reason why 
Americans should join in the scheme to honor his memory. He 
not only did all he could to assist the birth of the nation, but he 
invented the national beverage. 

Yet he always protested that he was very little of a chemist; and 
often said that his making chemical experiments at all was a kind of 
accident. ,A Yorkshireman by birth, the son of a cloth-finisher, he 
was one of those boys who take to learning as a duck takes to the 
water. He was an eager, precipitate student from his childhood up. 
Not content with the Latin and Greek of his school, he must needs 
learn Hebrew in the vacations, and push on into other ancient lan- 
guages of the East, — Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, — not neglecting such 
trifles as French, Italian, and German. This way of passing youth 
never fails to do lasting injury. He had an aversion to the glorious 
sports of the play-ground, and to all the lighter literature. Need I 
say, then, that, before he was eighteen years of age, his health had 
completely broken down, and he was obliged to lay aside his books 
for months. 

Beginning life as a Calvinist minister, he gradually adopted a 
milder theologj', — became, in fact, a Unitarian, and abandoned the 
pulpit for a time. Then he set up a school. He spent many years 
in teaching and writing school-books ; his first publication being an 
English grammar for children. At one school, where he taught for 
a while, a course of lectures was given upon chemistry, a science of 
which he knew nothing, not even its object or nature. Attending 
these lectures, his curiosity was awakened, and he began to experi- 
ment. 

It was Dr. Franklin's influence, however, that weaned him from 
other subjects, and caused him to devote his main strength to sci- 
ence. In 1761, when Dr. Franklin was in London, Priestley, who 
was in the habit of visiting the city once a year, sought the acquaint- 
ance of Franklin, and became intimate with him. Franklin related 
to him the history of those delightful six winters, during which he 
and his Philadelphia friends were experimenting in electricity. The 
young schoolmaster, who had already some success in book-making, 
now offered to write a history of electricity, if Franklin would put 
him in the way of getting the material. Twelve months after, 
Franklin had the pleasure of receiving from his industrious friend a 
copy of the work, one of those square, massive quartos, in which the 



AEKIVAL OF DR. PRIESTLEY. 499 

science of that age was usually given to the world. In this work 
was printed, for the first time, the narrative of Franklin's immortal 
experiment with the kite, which Priestley received from the experi- 
menter's own lips. It is a curious fact in the history of science, that 
Dr. Franklin himself never took the trouhle to write out an account 
of this experiment, — the most daring, ingenious, and celebrated 
which science records. The work was remarkably successful, passing 
through three editions in nine years. From this time onward, 
Priestley was almost wholly a man of science, and no year passed 
without his adding something to human knowledge. He very 
greatly increased our knowledge of the air we breathe, and its con- 
stituent gases. 

He would have been even more successful, if he had been earlier 
favored by fortune. Being compelled, through his poverty, to spend 
a large portion of his time and strength in earning his livelihood, 
he could not follow out his discoveries, nor pursue them with that 
watchful calm so necessary for avoiding error and perfecting truth. 
His zeal, however, made up in some degree for his lack of means ; 
and the list of his discoveries will always invest his name with dis- 
tinction. 

During the whole period of Franklin's residence in England, 
Priestley aided him by his pen and influence in opening the eyes of 
the public to the folly of the ministry in estranging the American col- 
onies. The last day of Franklin's stay in London, Priestley spent 
with him from morning to night, without interruption, looking over 
American newspapers just arrived. Franklin was completely over- 
come with the prospect of a civil war, and the dismemberment of the 
empire. 

"A great part of the day," says Dr. Priestley, "he was looking 
over a number of American newspapers, directing me what to 
extract from them for the English ones ; and in reading them he was 
frequently not able to proceed for the tears literally running down 
his cheeks." 

The two friends never met again ; for it was not until 1794, when 
Franklin had been dead four years, that the English philosopher 
landed in New York. He had a distinguished public reception in 
the city; and, proceeding to Philadelphia, he was invited to become 
Professor of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania. He 
declined, on the ground that he did not know enough of the subject. 



500 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

He refused also an offer, most munificent for that day, of a thousand 
dollars for a course of scientific lectures in Philadelphia. His labors 
in America were chiefly theological ; and he resided usuall}^ on his 
son's farm in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. He was an 
immense personage in his daj^ The public were constantly 
reminded of his existence by some publication bearing his name. 
According to Allibone, he gave the public one hundred and fort^'-one 
separate works. 

In those days people attached much more importance than we do 
to a man's religious oj)inions ; and consequently Dr. Priestley, though 
an exquisite Christian in temper and practice, incurred odium for his 
heterodoxy. The famous Robert Plall, a great admirer of Priestley, 
hearing one day that lie had been ill spoken of on account of his 
regard for Priestley, broke out in this magnificent manner : — 

" Are we suddenly fallen back into the darkness and ignorance of 
the Middle Ages, during which the spell of a stupid and unfeeling 
uniformity bound the nations in iron slumber, that it is become a 
crime to praise a man for talents which the whole world admire, and 
for virtues which his enemies confess, merely because his religious 
creed is erroneous ? If any thing could sink orthodoxy into con- 
tempt, it would be its association with such Gothic barbarity of 
sentiment, such reptile manners." 

Thus spoke an English dissenter. But Dr. Priestley, after escap- 
ing the violence of re-action in England, crossed the ocean at a time 
when re-action was about to resume power in America. Even the 
honors paid him on his arrival had something of a partisan charac- 
ter ; and Republicans made it as much a point to pay him attention 
as Federalists to avoid doing so. All the Franklin circle of Phila- 
delphia gathered round him ; and the Philosophical Society, founded 
by Franklin, gave him cordial welcome. Jefferson, during the com- 
ing years, found solace in his society and correspondence, and went 
to hear him as often as he preached in the Unitarian chapel. 

It stirred Jefferson's indignation, that a man of science so amiable 
as Priestley, who, he thought, honored his country by selecting it as 
an asylum, should have been made the object of party vituperation. 



CHAPTER LIU. 

JEFFERSON AS A FARMER. 

Eight bushels of wheat to the acre is not brilliant agriculture; 
nor could the production of eighteen bushels of Indian corn to the 
acre, at the present time, be thrown in the face of a rival farmer 
with any reasonable hope of abasing his pride. But in 1796, when 
Mr. Jefferson had been two years at home after retiring from the 
oflSce of secretary of state, and was showing his home-farm to an 
old French friend, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, these were the "><^ 
figures he gave as the utmost he could then extract from his lands 
in the garden of Virginia. The land was cheap enough, however, 
— four or five dollars an acre; and wheat sold in Richmond at two 
dollars and a half a bushel. Mr. Jefferson boasted that the wheat 
grown upon his mountain slopes was whiter than the low-country 
wheat, and averaged five or six pounds heavier to the bushel. 

Overseers, during his ten years' absence in the public service, had 
ravaged his farms in the fine old fashion of old Virginia. The 
usual routine was this : When the forest was first cleared, laying 
bare the rich, deep, black, virgin soil, the slow accumulation of ages 
of growth and decay, tobacco was grown for five successive years. 
That broke the heart of the land, and it was allowed to rest a while. 
Then tobacco was raised again, until tbe crop ceased to be remunera- 
tive ; and then the fields were abandoned to the crops sown by the 
methods of Nature; and she made haste to cover up with a growth 
of evergreens the outraged nakedness of the soil. But Jefferson 
had, long before, abandoned the culture of the exacting weed on his 
Albemarle estate. His overseers, therefore, had another rotation, 
which exhausted the soil more completely, if less rapidly. They 
sowed wheat in the virgin soil among the stumps ; next year, corn ; 
then wheat again ; then corn again ; and maintained this rotation 

501 



502 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

as long as they could gather a liarvest of five hushels of wheat or 
ten bushels of corn to the acre; after which Nature was permitted to 
have her way with the soil again, and new lands were cleared for 
spoliation. There was then no lack of land for the application of 
this method of exhaustion. Out of Mr. Jefferson's five thousand 
five hundred and ninety-one acres and two-thirds in Albemarle, less 
than twelve hundred were under cultivation. His estate of Poplar 
Forest was ne'arly as large, but only eight hundred acres were 
cleared. The land upon which the Natural Bridge was situated, 
one hundred and fifty-seven acres in extent, was a wilderness ; 
though he always hoped to build a hut there for retirement and 
repose, amid a scene which awoke all his enthusiasm. 

This sj'stem of agriculture wasted something more costly than 
Virginia land, namely, African muscle. One hundred and fiPty-four 
persons called Thomas Jeflierson master; equivalent, perhaps, to a 
working-force of eighty efficient field-hands. Give an Illinois or 
Ohio farmer of ability the command of such a force, on the simple 
condition of maintaining it in the style of old Virginia, and in fif- 
teen years he could be a niillionnaire. But, on the system practised 
in All*emarle in 1795, the slaves had two years' work to do in one. 
No sooner was the wretched crop of the summer gathered in, and 
the grain trodden out with horses, and the pitiful result set afloat in 
barges bound for Richmond, than the slaves were formed into chop- 
pin g-gangs, who made the woods melodious with the music of the 
axe during the long fall and winter. All the arts by w,hich the 
good farmer contrives to give back to his fields a little more than he 
takes from them were of necessity neglected; and the strenuous 
force of the eighty hands was squandered in an endless endeavor to 
make good the ravage of the fields by the ra'wiige of the woods. 
Mr. Jefferson's eight bushels of wheat, his eighteen of corn, and his 
scant ton of clover to the acre, was the beginning of victory, instead 
of the continuation of defeat. 

It was on the 16th of January,- 1794, that he surveyed once more 
his Albemarle estate from the summit of Monticello. Every object 
upon which he looked betrayed the ten years' absence of the master: 
the house unfinished, and its incompleteness made conspicuous by 
the rude w^ay in which it was covered up ; the grounds and gardens 
not advanced beyond their condition when he had last rambled over 
them by the side of the mother of his children j his fields all lying 



JEFFERSON AS A FAEMER. 503 

distinct before him like a map, irregular in shape, separated by 
zigzag fences and a dense growth of bushes ; outhouses dilapidated ; 
roads in ill-repair; the whole scene demanding the intelligent 
regard which he was burning to bestow upon it. Kever was there 
a Yankee in whom the instinct to improve was more insatiable; and 
seldom, out of old Ireland, has there been an estate that furnished 
such an opportunity for its gratification as this one in old Virginia. 
" Ten years' abandonment of my lands," he wrote to General Wash- 
ington, " has brought on them a degree of degradation far beyond 
what I had expected." 

After the lapse of two years and a half, the Duke de la Roche- 
foucauld saw a different prospect from the portico of Monticello. 
The summit, indeed, was disfigured with the litter of building; for, 
as the exile informs us, Mr. Jefferson, who had formerly studied 
architecture and landscape-gardening in books only, had since seen 
in Europe the noblest triumphs of both, and was endeavoring now 
to improve upon his original designs. Monticello, the duke 
remarks, had been infinitely superior before to all other homes in 
America; but in the course of anotlier year he thought, when the 
central dome would be finished, and the new designs happily 
blended with the old, the house would rank with the most pleasant 
mansions in France and England. And how enchanting the pano- 
rama ! Nothing to break the view to the ocean, from which, though 
it was a hundred and fifty miles distant, the cooling breeze reached 
the mountain. on a summer day about two in the afternoon. The 
traveller thought the prospect faultless except in two particulars, — 
too much forest and too little water. His European eye craved a 
cultivated expanse, — craved castle-crowned heights, the spire pier- 
cing the distant grove, the farm-house, the- cottage, and the village 
clustering in the vale ; and without a mass of water, he thought, 
the grandest view lacks the last charm. 

In the whole worl,d it had been difficult to find men who had 
more' in common than these two, — the exile from distracted France, 
and the American who never loved France so much as when the 
banded despotisms of Europe had driven her mad» Jefferson had 
last seen the duke, when, as president of the National Assembly of 
1789, he was striving, with Jefferson's cordial sympathy, to save 
kingship and establish liberty. It was La Eochefoucauld who 
sought the king's presence at Versailles on a memorable occasion 



504 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIT. 

in July, 1789, and laid before that bewildered locksmitli the real 
state of things at Paris. "But this is a revolt, then!" said the 
king. " Sire," replied the duke, " it is a revolution ! " Two days 
after the Bastille was in the hands of the people. Besides the 
political accord between Jefferson and his guest, they were both 
improvers by nature, and both most zealous agriculturists. For 
years the French nobleman had had upon his estate a model farm 
for the purpose of introducing into his neighborhood English meth- 
ods of tillage and improved utensils. He had maintained also an 
industrial school, and endeavored to plant in France the cotton man- 
ufacture which was beginning to make the world tributary to 
England. In a word, he was a citizen after the best American 
pattern, which is another way of saying that he' was a man after 
Jefferson's own heart. 

We can easily imagine the family group as they would gather 
on the portico to see the master of the house and his guest mount 
for a morning's ride over the farms. Jefferson was now approach- 
ing fifty-three, and his light hair was touched with gray ; but his 
face was as ruddy, his tall form as erect, his tread as elastic, his 
seat in the saddle as easy, as when at twenty-one he had galloped 
from Shadwell with Dabney Carr, From his youth temperate and 
chaste, keeping faith with man and woman, occupied always with 
pursuits worthy of a man, neither narrowed by a small ambition, 
nor perverted by malignant passions, nor degraded by vulgar appe- 
tites, equable, cheery, and affectionate, he only reached his prime at 
sixty, and shone with mellowing lustre twenty years longer, giving 
the world assurance of an unwasted manhood. The noble exile was 
forty-nine, with thirty-one years of rigorous life before him. The 
eldest daughter of the house, at home now because her father was 
at home, the mother of three fine children, had assumed something 
of matronly dignity during her six years of married life 5 and her 
husband had become a perfect Randolph, — tall, gaunt, restless, dif- 
ficult to manage, and not very capable of managing himself.' He 
vented superfluous energy, Mr. Randall tells us, in riding eighty 
miles a day through Virginia mud, and, rather than take the trouble 
of riding another mile or two to a bridge, would swim his foaming 
steed across a river in full flood. If making cavalry charges were 
the chief end of man, he had been an admirable specimen of our 
race 5 but, for life as it is in piping times of peace, he was not 



JEFFEESON AS A FAE]VIEE. 505 

always a desirable inmate, despite Lis hereditary love of botany, and 
his genuine regard for his father-in-law. 

Maria Jefferson, now seventeen years of age, attracted the French 
traveller; and he easily read the open secret of her young life. 
*'Miss Maria," he observes, "constantly resides with her father; 
but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she 
will doubtless soon find that there are duties which it is sweeter to 
perform than those of a daughter." " Jack Eppes " may have been 
one of the Monticello circle during those pleasant June daj's of 
1796, when the Duke de la Rochefoucauld surprised Mr, Jefferson 
in the harvest-field under a scorching sun. Perhaps the guest of 
the house may have said to the young college-student what he 
recorded in his narrative. He may even have accompanied the 
remark with the nearest thing to a wink which the politeness of the 
anclen regime permitted. "Mr. Jefferson's philosophic mind," 
observes the exile, "his love of study, his excellent library, which 
supplies him with the means of satisfying it, and his friends, will 
undoubtedly help him to endure this loss; which, moreover, is not 
likely to become an absolute privation, as the second son-in-law of 
Mrw Jefferson may, like Mr. Randolph, reside in the vicinity of 
Monticello, and, if he be worthy of Miss Maria, will not be able to 
find any company more desirable than that of Mr. Jefferson." 

But the horses aw^ait their riders. We may be sure that both 
gentlemen were well mounted. Virginia took the lead of all the 
thirteen colonies in breeding horses; and Jefferson, though he dif- 
fered irom his countrymen in things more important, surpassed 
them in his love of fine horses. And, curiously enough, it was only 
in dealing with horses that he was ever known to show any thing 
of that spirit of domination which marks some varieties of common 
men. With a pilfering negro, an uncomfortable neighbor,- a refrac- 
tory child, or a perverse colleague, his patience seemed inexhausti- 
ble ; but let a horse rebel, and the lash instantly descended, and the 
battle never ceased until the animal had discovered which of the 
two held the reins. He always loved the exhilaration of a race, and 
did not permit false ideas of official decorum to prevent his attend-, 
ing races near the seat of government, no matter what office he may 
have held. The saddle alone was his test of the quality of a horse, 
the trotting-wagon being unknow^n in the land of corduroy roads. 
Jefferson and the horsemen of that age liked to share the labor and 



506 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

peril of the ride witli the horse, seeking no vantage-ground of a 
vehicle from which to exercise mastery over him. He liked a horse 
fiery and sure-footed, that could gallop down his mountain on a dark 
night, and -carry him through flood and mire safe to the next village, 
while a negro would be fumbling over the broken bridle of his mule. 

On this occasion, however, there was no need of haste, and the 
two gentlemen descended at their ease the winding road to the 
country below. The French agriculturist was too polite to hint that 
his American brother's methods were defective ; and j'et he ap2:)ears 
to have thought so. Mr. Jefferson, lie intimates, was a book-farmer. 
" Knowledge thus acquired often misleads," the exile remarks, and 
"yet it is preferable to mere practical knowledge." In arranging 
his new system, Mr. Jefferson had betrayed a mathematical taste. 
All the old, unsightly fences, with their masses of bushes and bram- 
bles, having been swept awaj', he had divided his cultivated land 
into four farms of two hundred and eighty acres each, and divided 
each farm into seven fields of forty acres, marking the boundaries 
by a row of peach-trees, of which he set out eleven hundred and 
fifty-one during his first year at home. The seven fields indicated 
his new system of rotation, which embraced seven years : first jeaVf 
wheat; second, corn ; third, pease or potatoes ; fourth, vetches; fifth, 
wheat again ; sixth and seventh, clover. Each of the four farms, 
under its own overseer, was cultivated by four negroes, four 
negresses, four horses, and four oxen ; but at harvest and other busy 
times the whole working-force was concentrated. Upon each farm 
Mr. Jefferson had caused to be built a great log-barn, at little cost 
except the labor of the slaves. 

He did not fail to show his guest the new threshing-machine 
imported from Scotland, where it was invented, — the first specimen 
ever seen in Virginia. It answered its purpose so well, that several 
planters of the State had sent for machines, or were trying to get 
them made at home. " This machine," records the traveller, " the 
whole of which does not weigh two thousand pounds, is conveyed 
from one farm to another in a wagon, and threshes from one hun- 
dred and twenty to one hundred and fifty bushels a day."" Mr. Jef- 
ferson showed him, also, a drilling-machine for sowing seed in row^s, 
invented in the neighborhood, with the performance of which the 
master of Monticello was well pleased. Doubtless the two farmers 
discussed again that plough of Mr. Jefferson's invention for which 



JEFFERSON AS A FAEMEE. 507 

lie Lad received, in 1790, a gold medal from France. During liis 
European tours he had been struck with the waste of power caused 
by the bad construction of the ploughs in common use. The part 
of the plough called then the mould-board, which is above the 
share, and turns over the earth, seemed to him the chief seat of 
error; and he spent many of the leisure hours of his last two years 
in France in evolving from Euclid the mould-board which should 
offer the minimum of resistance. Nothing is more likely than that 
he had discussed the subject many a time in Paris with so ardent 
an agriculturist as the Duke de la Eochefoucauld. Satisfied, at 
length, that he had discovered precisely the best form of mould- 
board, he sent a plough provided with one to the Eoj'al Agricultural 
Society of the Seine, of which the duke was a member. The medal 
which they awarded it followed the inventor to ISTew York ; and, 
eighteen years after, the society sent President Jefferson a superb 
plough containing his improvement. 

An agreeable incident in connection with that plough invention 
has been reported. Among the many 3'oung Virginians who were 
educated under the direction of Mr. Jefferson was the late William 
C. E/ives, born almost in the shadow of Monticello. In 1S53, when, 
for the second time, Mr. Rives was American Minister at Paris, he 
was elected a member of the Agricultural Society, then temporarily 
dishonored hy the prefix " Imperial" to its name. In his address at 
his public reception, Mr. Pives alluded to the prize bestowed by 
the society half a century before upon one of his predecessors. 
" Yes," said the president, '' we still have, and will show you, the 
prize plough of Thomas Jefferson." • 

The French traveller was interested in seeing at Monticello a 
principality of two hundred inhabitants almost independent of the 
world without ; for Mr. Jefferson showed him a cluster of little shops 
"wherein his own negroes carried on all the necessary trades, such as 
carpentry, cabinet-making, shoe-making, tailoring, weaving. The 
masonry of the rising mansion was also executed by slaves. There 
was a mill upon the estate for the accommodation of the neighbor- 
hood. For many years the making of nails had been one of the 
winter industries of American farmers, all nails being then of 
the wrought description ; and Mr. Jefferson, too, had his nail-forge, 
wherein a foreman and half a dozen men and boys hammered out 
nails for the country round about. "When James JMonroe built his 



608 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

house near by, it was from his former instructor that he bought his 
nails. At times Jefferson had as many as ten nailers at work, — 
two fires, and five hands at each fire ; and he supplied the country 
stores far and near with nails, at an excellent rate of profit. His 
weaving-house grew, also, into a little factory of sixty spindles, pro- 
ducing cotton cloth enough for all his plantations, as well as a 
redundancy for the village stores. Some of the black mechanics 
whom the exile saw on his friend's estate were among the best 
workmen in Virginia. One man is spoken of as being a universal 
genius in handiwork. He painted the mansion, made some of its 
best furniture, repaired the mill, and lent a hand in that prodi- 
gious structure of the olden time, a family coach, planned by the 
master. 

The duke bears testimony to the kind, considerate way in which 
the slaves were treated. They had not only substantial justice, he 
tells us, but received special reward for special excellence. In the 
distribution of clothes, Mr. Randall adds, it was a system at Monti- 
cello to give better and handsomer garments to those who lived 
decently together in families than to the unmarried, — an expedient 
which had obvious good results. This was not freedom; but, in the 
Virginia of that period, there was room and chance of welfare for 
every kind of creature, excepting a free negro. 

The exile remained a week at Monticello in June, 1796, and then 
left his brother farmer to pursue his labors. " On several occa- 
sions," the duke records, " I heard him speak with great respect of 
the virtues of the president, and in terms of esteem of his sound and 
unerring judgment." He adds.these remarks : " In private life, Mr. 
JefFerson displays a mild, easy, and obliging temper, though he is 
somewhat cold and reserved. His conversation is of the most agree- 
able kind, and he possesses a stock of information not inferior to 
that of any other man. In Europe he would hold a distinguished 
rank among men of letters, and as such he has already appeared 
there : at present he is employed with activity and perseverance in 
th& management of his farms and buildings; and he orders, directs, 
and pursues, in the minutest detail, every branch of business relative 
to them. I found him in the midst of the harvest, from which the 
scorching heat of the sun does not j>revent his attendance. 



CHAPTER LIV. 

CAJN'DIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 

Had he, tlien, really accepted this plantation life as a career for 
the remainder of his daj-s ? 

In the first exultation at his recovered ease and liberty, in 1794, 
he thought he had. ''I return to farming,"' he wrote to his old 
friei^d and colleague, John Adams, in the midst of the joyous April 
work of that year, " with an ardc^- which I scarcely knew in my 
youth, and which has > got the better entirely of my love of study. 
Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, — which I have been 
in the habit of doing as a thing in course, — I put off asiswering my 
letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day, and then find them some- 
times postponed by other necessary occupations." At first, too, he 
was even indifferent to the newspapers. Young Buonaparte (he 
had not j'et dropped the u from his Italian name) had cannonaded 
the English out of Toulon Harbor a few weeks before ; and, though, 
his name was still unknown, his genius was making itself felt in the 
organization of the French armies. The great Toulon news, which 
reached Monticello by private letters a month after the masters 
return, recalled him to his old self for a moment. ITe even indulged 
in a little sanguine prophecy. "Over the foreign powers," he wrote 
in April, 1794, " I am convinced the French will triumph com- 
pletely." The French, led by Napoleoue di Buonaparte, a general 
of alien race, did triumph over the foreign powers ; but the rest of 
Mr. Jefferson's anticipation, happily, was not realized : " I cannot 
but hope that that triumph, and the consequent disgrace of the 
invading tj'rants, is destined, in the order of events, to kindle the 
wrath of the people of Europe against those who have dared to 
embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring, at length, kings, 
nobles, and priests to the scaifolds -which they have been so long 

509 



510 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

deluging with human blood. I am still warm whenever I thinlc of 
tlie?e scoundrels; though I do it as seldom as I can, preferring infi- 
nitel}^ to contemplate the tranquil growth of my lucerne and pota- 
toes.'"' 

ISTor did the lapse of a long summer change his mind. General 
"Washington naturally concluded, that the coming retirement of 
Hamilton from the cabinet would remove the cause of Jefferson's aver- 
sion to a cabinet office ; but it did not. In September, 1794, when an 
express from Philadelphia dismounted at his door, bearing an invita- 
tion from the president to resume the office of secretary of state, he 
replied that 7io circumstances would ever more tempt him to engage 
in any thing public. ..." I thought myself perfectly fixed in this 
determination when I left Philadelphia ; but every day and hour 
since has added to its inflexibility'." The president was sorely 
embarrassed. The aristocratical sentiment which had fixed the sala- 
ries of the higher offices at such a point that only rich men could 
accept them with safety to thei^ afftiirs and their honor, made it 
alwaj's difficult to fill them aright, and sometimes impossible. Jef- 
ferson sympathized with him, but felt himself justified in refusing. 
" After tweiity-five years' continual employment in the service of 
our country," he wrote to a friend, "I trust it will be thought I have 
fulfilled my tour, like a punctual soldier, and may (;laim my dis- 
charge." 

These words were written in November, 1795. In June, 1796, 
when the Duke de la Kochefoucauld discovered him in the scorching 
harvest-field, he was the candidate of the Eepublican party for the 
presidency. It was the year of the presidential election, and the 
noise of that quadrennial uproar was beginning to resound in every 
village. General Washington was going out of office in March, 1797. 
"Wliere was the American citizen inditferent to the mighty question, 
Who should succeed him? In 1796, for the first time, there was a 
contest, for the first office, — for Washington never had a competitor; 
and we can all imagine — we who are familiar with such scenes — 
with what ardor a young republic, in peril between two such power- 
ful belligerents as France and England, would spring to a contest so 
novel, so interesting, so momentous. 

How are we to reconcile the habitual language of Jefferson in 1794 
and 1795 with his position before the country in 1796 ? It is not 
necessary to reconcile it, since it is permitted to every man to change 



CANDIDATE FOU THE PRESIDENCY. 511 

his mind ; and considering the limits and defects of that portion of 
our organization, what can we do better with our minds than change 
them ? But the discrepancj'' was much more apparent than reah 
In predicting the future, Jefferson's hopeful disposition frequently 
led him astray ; but his judgment concerning the issue of a contested 
election was remarkably sound. His conviction was, that the time 
had not yet come for a national triumph of the Republicans. The 
bloody lapse of the French Revolution was too recent, the tide of 
re-action too strong, vis inert ice of ancient habit too general, Hamil- 
ton too active, Bonaparte too young (he was in Italy now, and had 
dropped the Italian u from his name), the French Directory was too 
touchy, and the French marine too indiscriminate in the matter of 
prize-taking on the ocean, to afford a Republican calculator ground for 
expecting an immediate triumph of his half-organized party in the 
United States. Nor had the Federalists yet filled up tlie measure 
of their errors, nor attained that advanced degree of madness which 
immediately precedes destruction. The countr}', too, was getting 
rich by suppl^'ing the belligerents with flour, beef, pork, fish, fruit, 
potatoes, and rum. Those square, spacious, handsome houses, which 
still give an air of mingled comfort and grandeur to the old towns 
on the New England coast, — Newburyport, Portsmouth, Salem, 
Portland, — and others, were beginning to be built. As President 
"Washington remarked in March, 1796, in a letter to Gouverneur 
Morris, " No city, town, village, or even farm, but what exhibits 
evidence of increasing wealth and prosperity'', while taxes are hardly 
known but in name." 

Jefferson, therefore, felt that he was in small danger of being 
tcirn from Monticello by an election to the presidency. Vice-presi- 
dent, indeed, he might be, through that absurd relic of Hamilton's 
mischievous ingenuity, the electoral college, which even now, in 
1874, waits to be swept into oblivion. By the sj'-stem as then estab- 
lished, the candidate receiving the next to the highest number of 
electoral votes was declared to be vice-president ; so that there was 
always a probability that the presidential candidate of the party 
defeated would be elected to the second office. That office, however, 
happened to be the only one, in the gift of the people or of the presi- 
dent, which Jefferson thought desirable in itself: .first, because the 
salary paid the cost of four months' residence at the seat of govern- 
ment 5 secondly, because it gave the occupant eight months' leisure ; 



012 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

anrl, thirdly, because it enhanced a man's power to disseminate 
and recommend principles, without his joining in the conflict of 
parties. 

Behold him, then, in a new character, one of the most trying to 
human virtue, digestion, nerve, and dignity ever contrived by mor- 
tals for a mortal, — candidate for the presidency ! To him, partly 
because he was a Democrat, partly because he was Jefferson, it was 
less trying than to any other man that ever was subjected to it. At 
once, without effort, without a precedent to guide him, without con- 
sultation with friends, he comprehended the morality of the situa- 
tion, and assumed the proper attitude toward it. His tone, his 
demeanor, his feelings, his conduct, were all simply right ; and, since 
a considerable portion of the inhabitants of the United States expect 
one day to stand in the same bewildering relation to the universe, it 
may be useful to some of them to know how he comported himself. 

His grand advantage was, that he did not want the office. He was 
in the position of a belle who is wooed, not in that of the pale and 
anxious lover who trembles with desire and fear. It is an immense 
thing, if 3^ou have property to dispose of, to be able to stand serene 
in the market, not cari^ig whether you sell it this year or next, or 
never. Nor was this any thing so very meritorious in such a man. 
All men, it is true, love power, who are capable of wielding power ; 
but there are grades and kinds of power. All men love ; but each 
man's love takes the quality of his nature. The noble love nobly ; 
the base, basely ; the common, commonly. The feeling that bound 
together in sweet and sublime accord Goethe and Schiller, the 
noblest pair of lovers since Socrates and Plato, was only called 
love ; and the instinct that originally drew Bill Sikes to the side of 
Nancy was also love, of the Sikes quality, the best he had to bestow. 
In like manner, power is of as many grades as there are grades of 
men. Rude physical strength is power in the dawn of civilization. 
In a commercial city, to possess five million dollars is power. A 
refinement upon this crude form was that mystical device of former 
ages, now no longer potent, styled Rank. Great ministers like 
Richelieu were an advance upon the men of mere pedigree, as the 
Leader of the House of Commons is an advance upon them. Latest 
and highest is that power which Jefferson craved, — that of govern- 
ing men and moulding institutions by the promulgation of heartfelt 
truth. 



CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 513 

Valuing power, but not place, he found it easy to adhere to the 
rule which he adopted: To avoid'writing or conversing on politics 
during the contest, except with two or three confidential friends. 
According to Mr. Adams, it was in 1793, soon after the publication 
of Jefferson's correspondence with Genet and Hammond, that the 
movement began which ended in his nomination. Boston, of all 
places in'the world, originated it! Boston, too, enjoys the credit of 
having originated the method by which it was done, as well as the 
word which describes that method, — caucus. "The Republican 
party," says Mr. Adams, "had a caucus in 1793, and wrote to jMr. 
Jefferson, upon his resignation of the office of secretary of state, 
that, if he would place himself at their head, they would choose him 
at the next election ; and they organized their party by their corre- 
spondences through the States." Whatever civil reply the candidate 
may have made to these gentlemen, he did not place himself at their 
head, but remained passive and silent from that time until the ques- 
tion had been decided. 

These Jefifersonian rules will guide a.\-\j man with safety and dig- 
nity through the thousand snares of such a contest: 1, Don't want 
the office ; 2, Utter no syllable concerning it beyond the narrowest 
circle of tried confidants. 

It was the Jay treaty of 1794, ratified in 1795, and executed in 
1796, which imbittered politics during this strife for the control of 
the administration, and nearly gave it to Jefferson. Who shall now 
presume to judge between the able and honest men of that day who 
so widely differed concerning this treaty? Having sent Mr. Jay to 
England to negotiate, we can easily admit that the president did 
well to ratify the treaty which resulted; but the difficult question is, 
Was it becoming in the United States to send a special envoy, the 
chief judge of its highest court, to negotiate with a country from 
which it liad received, and was hourly receiving, indignity and wrong? 
It was no more becoming than it is becoming in a man, creation's 
lord, to make terms with a lion that has got his hand in its mouth, 
or with a bull which has obtained prior possession of a field. It was 
not becoming in G-alileo to kneel submissive before the herd of infu- 
riate inquisitors who had power to roast him. But it was right. 
He had been a traitor to his class and to his vocation, to science and 
to man, if he had allowed those tonsured savages to rack and burn 
an aged philosopher. His lie was a wiser fidelity to truth. There 

33 



514 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK 

is sometimes an accidental and extreme inequality of force between 
a spoiler and Ijis victim wliicli suspends the operation of some moral 
laws in favor of the victim, and makes a device justifiable, which, in 
ordinary circumstances, would be dastardlj'. 

It is difficult for us to realize the weakness of the country ovei? 
which George Washington presided. If its four millions of people 
had all been cast in the heroic mould, capable of Spartan discipline, 
like-minded, demanding for their country, with unanimous voice, 
only untarnished honor, with or without prosperity, even in that 
case it had been a doubtful question ; for there would still have been 
a hand i^ the lion's mouth, — Detroit and the chain of lake-posts 
occupieil by British garrisons, the mouth of the Mississippi held by 
the Spanish, and no single port of the coast capable of keeping out 
an armed slooj). But the j^eople of the United States had only 
their fair share of heroic souls ; and there was the most honest and 
irreconcilable difference of opinion among them as to which of the 
belligerents was really fighting the battle of mankind and civiliza- 
tion. President Washington was as right in sending Mr. Jay to 
London as the Eepublicans were right in opposing it. The presi- 
dent, surveying the whole scene from the watch-tower of his office, 
weighing all the circumstances, hearing all opinions, considering all 
interests, felt it admissible to court a power he could not crush. 
Eepublicans, considering only tlie obvious facts of the situation, 
longing to see their country joining heart and hand with France in 
her unequal strife, yet willing to be neutral, could not but lament a 
policy which looked like abasement to a powerful foe, and abandon- 
ment of a prostrate friend. Tlie modern student of those mad 
times finds himself at this conclusion: "If I had' been Washing- 
ton, I should have made the treaty : if I had been Jefferson, I should 
have held it in execration." 

What a struggle it cost the president to choke down this huge 
bolus of humiliation is revealed in his leters. If he had put ofi" the 
departure of the envoy a few weeks, he would, perhaps, have put it 
off forever, and the course of events in the United States had gone 
otherwise. While Mr. Jay was upon the ocean. Colonel Simcoe, the 
Governor of Upper Canada, published a protest which claimed juris- 
diction over a wide expanse of territory of the United States which 
the posts commanded. The president, during the whole of his 
administration, never wrote an official letter showing such warmth 



CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY* 515 

of indignation as the one which he instantly penned to Mr. Jay, 
hoping to send it by a vessel on the point of sailing from New York. 
The best of Washington's letters are those which we know he must 
have written with his own hand ; and this is one of them. It is the 
letter of a man, not of a secretary. Smooth and polished it is not; 
but it has the eloquence of deep emotion struggling in vain for ade- 
quate expression. He begins by saying, that, on this irregular and 
high-handed proceeding, he would rather hear what tha ministry of 
Great Britain will say than pronounce his own sentiments. Never- 
theless, he does tell Mr. Ja}^, that, although this amazing claim of 
Colonel Simcoe is the most audacious thing yet done by British 
agents in America, it is by no means the most cruel. To this the 
president adds a parac^raph which contains ten years of bloody his- 
tory : — 

" There does not remain a doubt in the mind 'of any well-informed 
person in this countrj^, not shut against conviction, that all the difS- 
culties we encounter with the Indians, their hostilities, the murders 
of helpless women and innocent children along our frontiers, result 
from the conduct of the agents of Great Britain in this country. In 
vain is it, then, for its administration in Britain to disavow having 
given orders which will warrant such conduct, whilst their agents 
go unpunished ; whilst we have a thousand corroborating circum- 
stances, and, indeed, almost as many evidences, some of which can- 
not be brought forward, to prove that they are seducing from our 
alliance, and endeavoring to remove over the line, tribes that have 
hitherto been kept in peace and friendship with us at a heavy 
expense, and who have no cause of complaint, except pretended ones 
of their creating; whilst they keep in a state of irritation the tribes 
who are hostile to us, and are instigating those who know little of 
us ov we of them, to unite in the war against us ; and whilst it is 
an undeniable fact, that they are furnishing the whole with arms, 
ammunition, clothing, and even provisions, to carry on the war ; I 
might go farther, and, if they are not much belied, add men, also, 
in disguise." 

Thus General Washington, in August, 1794. Mr. Wendell 
Phillips was much censured some time ago for expressing a similar 
opinion on the platform. The president proceeded to declare that 



516 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

nothing sliort of a surrender of the posts could prevent war between 
the two countries ; and Mr. Jay was to say to the ministry, "Give 
up the posts, — peace ! Keep the posts, — war ! " 

Contrary to expectation, the amiable and virtuous envoy found 
court, parliament, ministry, people, king, all desirous of a better 
understanding. And who could have been better chosen for such 
an embassy to such a country than John Jay, a devoted member of 
the English Church, a friend of Wilberforce, a gentleman whose 
virtues, tastes, foibles, and limitations were as English as if he had 
been born and reared in a rural parish of Sussex? The king smiled 
benignantly upon him, and told him he thought he would succeed 
in his mission. After live months' negotiation, a treaty was con-- 
eluded which Mr. Jay was willing to sign ; not because he thought 
it good and sufficient, but because he knew it to be the least bad 
then possible, and, upon the whole, better than none, — better than 
drifting into war. The posts were to be surrendered. Commission- 
ers were to be appointed — two hy the king, two by the president, 
and one by these four — to award damages to the' owners of Ameri- 
can ships illegally captured. Other commissioners were to settle the 
claims of the English creditors of American merchants. American 
vessels of seventy tons' burden could trade between the West Indies 
and the United States, but not carr3^ West India produce to any 
other country. American ships could trade with the East Indies 
and other distant British possessions, on possible terms. But what- 
ever could feed a French soldier, or equip a French ship, was 
declared contraband; and an American captain obtained from the 
treaty neither any limitation of the right of search, nor the slight- 
est additional protection against the press-gang. No compensation 
was made for the loss of millions of dollars and many hundreds of 
lives through the eleven years' lawless retention of the posts, and 
none for the negroes carried off from New York and Virginia after 
the peace of 1783. 

In the innocence of his heart, Mr. Jay supposed at first that the 
concessions of the treaty were due to a revival of friendly feeling on 
the part of the English people. On the eve of his departure for 
America, the merchants concerned in American commerce gave him 
a dinner, at which the leading cabinet ministers and two hundred 
merchants assisted. When the health of the president was proposed, 
the company could not express all their enthusiasm in the " three 



CANDIDATE FOE THE PRESIDENCY. 517 

cheers" prescribed by the chairman, but prolonged them to six. 
Every toast, Mr. Jay reports, which referred in a friendly manner 
to America, was received with " general and strong marks of appro- 
bation." At length an incident occurred which threw light upon 
the unconscious motive of the cheerers. " Toward the conclusion 
of the feast," Mr. Jaj' relates, " I was asked for a toast. I gave a 
neutral one, namely, ' A safe and honorable peace to all the belliger- 
ent powers.' You cannot conceive how coldly it was received ; and 
though civility induced them to give it three cheers, yet they were 
so faint and single, as most decidedly to show that peace was not 
the thing they wished. These were merchants." If Mr. Jay had 
desired to hear thunders of applause, and see the glasses dance on 
the thumped mahogan}'^, he should have given, War eternal, and 
British bottoms forever ! 

The treaty was received in the United States with what must 
have seemed, at the time, universal execration. Even Hamilton, 
though he favored ratification, pronounced it, and justly pronounced 
it, " execrable ; " nor was he entirely wrong in saying that Mr. Jay 
was "an old woman for making it." It i<;as 'because Mr. Jay 
possessed some of the traits which we revere in our grandmothers, 
that he was able to make the treaty. Posterity's verdict on this 
matter is one in which each successive student of the period will 
finally acquiesce : that a president of the United States has seldom 
done an act more difficult, more wise, or more right than the ratifi- 
cation of the Jay treaty of 1794, which procured the surrender of 
the posts, inaugurated the policy that naturally issued in arbitration, 
made some slight beginnings of reciprocity and free trade, and 
postponed inevitable war for eighteen years. If ever there was 
a case in which half a loaf was better than no bread, surely it was 
this. 

But the agonizing want of the other half of the loaf justifies the 
opposition. That was the time when collections were still made in 
churches for the ransom of American mariners in captivity among 
the Algerines ; when the' whole crew of an American vessel was fre- 
quently impressed by a British man-of-war at out-of-the-way places, 
like the Barbadoes ; when a neutral vessel had no rights which a 
" dashing " British captain would allow to stand between himself and 
his object ; when a suspicion that a schooner containing provisions 
was bound for a French port often sufficed to condemn her. A 



518 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

search in the old garrets of Salem, Gloucester, Newburyport, New 
London, or any other old town on the coast, would discover hundreds 
of letters like those given by Mrs. E. Vale Smith in her History of 
Newburyport. One captain of a schooner writes home, in 1794, 
from Martinico : "We are continually insulted and abused by the 
British. The commodore saj^s, ' All American property here will 
be confiscated.' My schooner is unloaded, stripped, and plundered 
of everything. Nineteen American sail here have been libelled; 
seven of them were lashed together, and drifted ashore, and stove to 
pieces." Worse outrages occurred in 1796, when the Republicans 
were concentrating all their forces upon defeating the appropriation 
needful for the execution of tlie Jay treaty. How grand in Wash- 
ington to ratify it ! How pardonable the execrations that form a 
great part of the glory of the act ! 

It was in April, 179C, that the battle of the treaty was fought in 
the House of Representatives. The man that saved it was, as tradi- 
tion reports, Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, whose speech in its 
defence, delivered to a concourse of people, lived in the memory of 
that generation as the greatest achievement of eloquence which the 
American j^arliament had yet exhibited. He was just the man to 
plead for such a treaty ; for he was a conservative by the nature of 
his mind, and the pulmonary disease which was to terminate his 
existence twelve years after had already overspread his face with 
pallor and tinged his mind with gloom. A man so gifted as he 
was, if in robust and joyous health, might have been brought to 
vote for the treat}^, but he could not have defended it with such 
warmth and pathos. His appearance, as he rose to speak, was that 
of a man with one foot in the grave ; and his first words gave the 
impression to the audience that they were assisting at a scene like 
those in which Chatham, swathed in flannel, had risen in the 
House of Lords to speak for the rights of Englishmen violated in 
America, or to rebuke the employment of savages in a war upon 
brethren. " I entertain the hope," he faltered, " perhaps a rash one, 
that my strength will hold me out to speak a few minutes." He 
was not, however, as near death as he looked ; and as he went on, 
speaking in a peculiar, reserved tone, low, but solemn, weighty, and 
penetrating, he gathered strength, and spoke for an hour in a man- 
ner which intbralled every hearer. Toward the close occurred the 
famous tomahawk passage, in which he foretold the consequences 



CANDIDATE FOE THE PEESIDENCY. 519 

to tLe frontiers of a longer retention of the posts by the English. 
On reaching this subject, the orator was no longer an invalid. He 
was transfigured. His words seemed fraught with passionate appre- 
hension, and drew tears from the eyes, not of women only, but of 
judges grown gray on the bench. Such poor sentences as these 
fell from his lips in tones that disguised their poverty and 
irrelevancy : — 

"By rejecting the posts, we light the savage fires, we bind the 
victims. This day we undertake to render account to the widows 
and orphans whom our decision may make, to the wretches that will 
be roasted at the stake, to our country, and, I do not deem it too 
serious to say, to conscience and to God. The voice of humanity 
issues from the shade of the wilderness. It exclaims, that, while 
one hand is held up to reject this treaty, the other grasps a /toma- 
hawk. I can fancy that I listen to the yells of savage vengeance 
and the shrieks of torture ; already they seem to sigh in the westerA 
wind; already they mingle with every echo from the mountains. 
This treaty, like a rainbow on the edge of the cloud, marked to our 
eyes the space where the storm was raging, and afforded at the 
same time the sure prognostic of fair weather. If we reject it, the 
vivid colors will grow pale : it will be a baleful meteor, portending 
tempest and war." 

When by such appeals as these he had wrought upon the feelings 
and the fears of his auditors, he again, by a stroke of the orator's art, 
drew attention to himself. "I have," said he, "as little personal 
interest in the event as any one here. There is, I believe, no mem- 
ber who will not think his chance to be a witness to the consequences 
greater than mine. If, however, the vote should pass to reject, and 
a spirit should arise, as it will, with the public disorders to make 
confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as 
my hold upon life is, may outlive the government and Constitution 
of my country. 

The last stroke completed the subjugation of his audience. "My 
God ! " exclaimed Irish Judge Iredell (of the Supreme Court) to 
Vice-president Adams seated at his side, " how great he is ! how 
great he has been ! " " Noble ! " cried Adams. " Bless my stars ! " 
broke in the judge, after a pause, "I never heard any thing so great 



520 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

since I was born ! *' " Divine ! " chimed in the vice-president. 
And so they continued their interchange of interjections while the 
tears rolled down their cheeks. "Not a dry eye in the house," Mr. 
Adams reports, '"'excei^t some of the jackasses who had occasioned 
the oratory. These attempted to laugh, but their visages grinned 
horribly ghastly smiles." The ladies, he adds, wished the orator's 
soul had a better body. Forty-eight hours after, the treaty was 
carried by a vote of fifty-one to forty-eight. 

It is not unlikely that Fisher Ames's appeal to the apprehensions 
and sympathies of the Holise, supported by his artful allusion to the 
interests involved, may have added the needful votes to the side of 
the administration. He did not disdain to remind his auditors on 
this occasion, that "profit was every hour becoming capital," and 
that "the vast crop of our neutrality was all seed-wheat, and was 
sown again to swell almost beyond calculation the future harvest of 
our prosperity." He was right there. Seldom has there been a treaty 
that brought in a larger return of profit, and never one that yielded 
less honor. Mau}'^ interests united in the demand .for the treaty. 
It was only the honor and dignitj'' of the nation that could be ' 
sacrificed by accepting it; and they were only saved by the hard 
necessity of the case. A hand was in the lion's mouth which it 
was a thing of necessity to get out; and on the 1st of June, 1796, 
when the posts were surrendered, that indispensable preliminary to 
a fair fight was accomplished. 

From the airy height of Monticello, Jetferson surveyed this 
troubled scene with the deepest interest. He held the treaty in 
abhorrence. He thought the honest part of its friends were influ- 
enced by an excessive, unreasonable dread of the power of Great 
Britain ; and the dishonest, by the vast pecuniary interests involved. 
He speaks of one person, high in oflQ.ce, who was possessed in turn 
by a mortal fear of two bugbears, — a British fleet and the demo- 
cratical societies. Years after the storm of this controversy had 
blown over, he still adhered to the opinion, that, "by a firm yet just 
conduct in 1793, we might have obtained a respect for our neutral 
rights." Not being a military man, having, indeed, no military 
instincts, the recovery of the posts did not strike his mind as a 
compensation for the defects of the treaty ; and inhabiting a part of 
the country which shared the perils of the situation, hut not its 
]^TOs;perity, which bore the shame of a violated flag without deriv- 



CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 521 

ing profit from the commerce that escaped interruption, he desired 
ardently the rejection of the treaty. Once, in the heat of the con- 
troversy, he declared that General Washington was the only honest 
man who favored it. Silence, however, became a candidate for the 
presidency ; and, though he lent the aid of his experience and 
knowledge to Madison in private conferences, he uttered not a word 
designed for the public eye or ear. After the final acceptance of 
the treaty in April, 179G, he passed a quiet, pleasant summer in the 
congenial labors of his farm and garden, arid in building his house, 
never going seven miles from home. 

To secure the influence of General Washington was one of the 
objects of both parties. The president could have decided this 
election by merely letting it be distinctly known which of the two 
candidates he pi'eferred for his successor. Nor were attempts want- 
ing to bias his mind. Onl}'' a few months after Jefferson's return 
home, in 1794, Governor Henry Lee of Virginia, a recent convert to 
Federalism, felt it to be his duty to do a dastardly act : he was con- 
strained by his conscience to report to the president a question 
which Mr. Jefferson was said to have addressed to a guest at his 
own house. Lee was not present when this awful question was 
asked; but he had received his information from the "very respect- 
able gentleman" of whom Mr. Jefferson had made the inquiry: 
"Was it 2)ossible that the president had attached himself to Eng- 
land, and was governed by British influence ? " General Washing- 
ton, though he stooped to reply to this small infamy, marked his 
sense of it by immediately (two daj^s after) sending an express to 
invite Jefferson back to his old place in the cabinet. And now, in 
the summer of 1796, we find him writing to Jefferson in the most 
frank and friendly manner, as of old, though evidently smarting 
under the sharp attacks of the Republican press. People told him, 
he wrote, that Mr. Jefferson had represented the president as being 
too much under Hamilton's influence. "My answer," said he, 
" has invariably been, that I had never discovered any thing in the 
conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insin- 
cerity ; that, if he would retrace my public conduct while he was in 
the administration, abundant proofs would occur to him, that truth 
and right decisions were the sole objects of my pursuit ; that there 
were as many instances within his own knowledge of my having 
decided against as i?i favor of the opinions of the person evidently 



522 LIFE OF THOIMAS JEFFERSON". 

alluded to; and, moreover, that I was no believer in the infallibility 
of the politics or measures of any man living." At the same time, 
be bitterlj'' complained that he should be rewarded for an honest 
attempt to avert a desolating war, by being assailed ^' in such exag- 
gerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Xero, 
a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." Mrs. 
Washington, who is said to have hated "filthy democrats" with all 
the ardor of a lady of the old school, sent her "best wishes" to the 
chief democrat on this occasion. Indeed, nothing like a breach 
ever occurred between the two families or the two men ; and Jef- 
ferson never failed, on any occasion, to the last day of his life, to 
do justice, not alone to the integrity of Washington, — which was 
never questioned, — but to his mind and judgment, which Hamilton 
underrated, if he did not despise. To Jefferson's pen we owe the 
best characterization of Washington which comes down to us from 
his contemporaries. 

The strife of parties continued during the summer and autumn of 
1796. The contest was unexpectedly close. The Jaj'^ treaty, though 
the remoter commerce of the young nation was almost created by it, 
seemed at first, to the great damage of his friends, only to give new 
audacity to the dashing British captain. " Three hundred American 
vessels seized, and one thousand American sailors impressed," during 
the 3'-ear following its ratification ! Such was the statement of the 
Republican press of the period. Long lists of seizures lie before me, 
— not tliree hundred, it is true, nor one hundred, but enough to stir 
the indignation of those who read the particulars, even at this late 
day. Nor was the news from France re-assuring. Republicans, in 
1796, could point to France, after exhibiting the catalogue of British 
impressments and captures, and say, with alarming appearance of 
truth, The Jay treaty, which has not conciliated our most danger- 
ous enemy, has alienated our only friend. 

James Monroe replaced in Paris the brilliant aristocrat, Gouver- 
neur Morris, a few days after the execution of Robespierre had 
broken the spell of terror. The National Convention received the 
young Republican with every honor which enthusiasm could suggest. 
Reiterated plaudits greeted his entrance, and followed the reading of 
a translation of his address. The chairman of the Convention re- 
plied in a style of rhetorical flourish that made Monroe's plain speech 
seem a model of Roman simplicity. "Why." said the president 



CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 523 

at length, "should I delay to confirm the friendship of our republics 
by the fraternal embrace I am directed to give you in the name of 
the French people ? Come and receive it in the name of the Amer- 
ican people ; and may this scene destroy the last hope of the impious 
band of tyrants ! " Mr. Monroe was then conducted to the presi- 
dent, who, as the Moniteur of the next day reports, " gave the kiss 
and embrace in the midst of universal acclamations of joy, delight, 
and admiration." Republican Paris smiled upon the new minister. 
He found it not difficult to procure the release of Thomas Paine 
from the Luxembourg. He wrote consolingly to Paine in his prison, 
claiming him as an American citizen concerning whose welfare 
Americans could not be indifferent, and for whom the president cher- 
ished a grateful regard. He received the sick and forlorn captive 
into his house, and entertained him for a year and a half. All went 
well with Mr. Monroe until the rumor of Jay's mission reached 
Paris. Prom that hour to the convention of 1800, the relations of 
the United States with France had but one course, from bad to worse ; 
French captains, at length, surpassing the English in dashing 
exploits upon schooners hailing from the American coast. 



CHAPTER LV. 

ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. . 

It was for these reasons that the voters were so evenly divided in 
November, 1796, between the candidates of the two parties, — Adams 
and Pinckney, Jefferson and Burr. Jefferson had the narrowest 
escape from being elected to the presidency : Adams 71, Jefferson 
68, Pinckney 59, Burr 30, Samuel Adams 15, Oliver Ellsworth 11, 
George Clinton 7, Jay 5, Iredell 2, George Washington 2, John 
Henry 2, Samuel Johnson 2, C. C. Pinckney 1. It was a geograph- 
ical result. Eor Adams, the North ; for Jefferson, the South, — 
except that Jefferson received every Pennsylvania vote but one, and 
Adams seven from Maryland, one from Virginia, and one from 
North Carolina. Hamilton might well say that Mr. Adams was 
elected by a kind of " miracle ; " for the three votes that elected him 
were, so to speak, unnatural, eccentric, contrary to all rational expec- 
tation, against the current of popular feeling in the States which 
gave them, namely, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia. 
According to the Constitution, not then amended, Mr. Jefferson, hav- 
ing received next to the highest number of electoral votes, was 
elected vice-president. 

December was well advanced before he knew the result. His feel- 
ings on learning it were fully expressed in a confidential letter to 
his other political self, James Madison. He said the vote had conle 
much nearer an equality than he had expected, and that he was well 
content with his escape. " As to the first office," said he, " it was 
impossible that a more solid unwillingness, settled on full calculation, 
could have existed in any man's mind, short of the degree of abso- 
lute refusal. The only view on which I would have gone into it for 
a while was, to put our vessel on her republican tack, before she 
should be thrown too much to leeward of her true principles. As to 

524 



ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. * 525 

the second, it is the only office in the world about which I am unable 
to decide in my own mind whether I had rather have it or not have 
it. Pride does not enter into the estimate ; for I think with the 
Romans, that the general of to-day should be a soldier to-morrow if 
necessar3\ I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt 
at a secondary position to Mr. Adams. I am his junior in life, was 
his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior 
lately in our civil government." Nay, more : " If Mr. Adams can 
be induced to administer the government on its true principles, and 
to relinquish his bias to an English constitution, it is to be considered 
whether it would not be, on the whole, for the public good to come to 
a good understanding with him as to his future elections. He is, 
perhaps, the only sure barrier against Hamilton's getting in." 

Having settled these affairs of state, he proceeds to discourse upon 
a parcel of books which Madison had lately sent him. In this letter 
to Madison he enclosed an open one to Mr. Adams, leaving it to 
Madison's discretion to forward or return it. JeflFerson's doubt as to 
the propriety of sending this letter arose from the awkwardness of 
professing indifference to public honors. Not one man in five could 
then believe such professions sincere ; and we see, in all the cam- 
paign frenzy of those years, the most unquestioning assumption that 
Jefferson's every act and word had but one object, — the presidency. 
He desired to say to Mr. Adams how satisfied he was, personally, 
with the result of the election, and to congratulate him upon the 
honor his country had done him. '' I leave to others," he wrote, 
*' the sublime delight of riding in the storm, better pleased with 
sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, 
friends, and fellow-laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. 
No one, then, will congratulate you with purer disinterestedness than 
myself. The share, indeed, which I may have had in the late vote, 
I shall still value highly, as an evidence of the share I have in the 
esteem of my fellow-citizens. But still, in this point of view, a few 
votes less would be little sensible ; the difference in the effect of a 
few more would be very sensible and oppressive to me. I have no 
ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office." 

Upon reflection, Mr. Madison deemed it best not to send this let- 
ter. The ''ticklish temper," of Mr. Adams, the consideration due 
to those who had so vehemently contested his election, and the prob- 
able future necessity of opposing his measures, induced him to keep 



526 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the letter till Mr. Jefferson's arrival at the seat of government. At 
the same time Mr. Madison admitted " the duty and policy of culti- 
vating Mr. Adams's favorable disposition, and giving a fair start to 
his executive career." 

As soon as the result of this long contest was known, an imagina- 
tive paragraphist evolved the report, that Mr. Jefferson would not 
deign to accept the second office. The rumor rapidly spread itself 
over the country. Madison wrote to Monticello, suggesting that the 
best way to dispel so absurd an imputation was for Mr. Jefferson to 
come to Philadelphia and be publicly sworn in on the 4th of March. 
It was one of the ''cold winters " of the century. On the very day 
upon which Madison wrote this letter the shivering lord of Monti- 
cello, in the course of a long meteorological letter to Voluey (in exile 
at Philadelphia) used these words : " It is at this moment so cold, that 
the ink freezes in my pen, so that my letter will scarcely be legible." 
It is to be feared that the remodelled mansion was not yet weather- 
proof. For so healthy a man, Jefferson was curiously susceptible of 
cold ; and he once wrote that he had suffered during his life more 
from cold than from all other phj'sical causes put together. He 
resolved however, as he told Madison, to appear in Philadelphia on 
the day of tlie inauguration, " as a mark of respect for the public, 
and to do away with the doubts which have spread that I should con- 
sider the second office as beneath my acceptance." The journey, 
however, he owned, was " a treiuendous undertaking for one who had 
not been seven miles from home since his resettlement." 

Jefferson's aversion to ceremonial was manifested on this occa- 
sion. It was an article of his political creed, that political office 
stood upon the same footing as any other respectable vocation, and 
entitled tlie holder to no special consideration ; no respect except 
that which justly rewards fidelity to any important trust; no eti- 
quette except such as that very fidelity necessitates ; no privileges 
except those legally given to facilitate the discharge of public duty. 
Holding this opinion, he wrote to Mr. Tazewell of the Senate, ask- 
ing him to prevent the sending of a costly and imposing embassy to 
notify him of his. election, as had been done when General Wash- 
ington and Mr. Adams were first elected. Better drop a letter into 
the post-office, said he in substance : it is the simplest, quickest, 
and surest way. He begged Madison, also, to discoura-ge any thing 
that might be proposed in the way of a public reception at Phila- 



ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. 527 

delpliia. "If Governor Mifflin" (of Pennsylvania, a pronounced 
Kepublican), " should show any symptoms of ceremony, j)Viiy con- 
trive to parry them." 

When John Howard was appointed high-sheriff of his county, 
he conceived the novel idea of inquiring wliat duties were attached 
to the office. The duties of a high-sheriff, he was informed, w^ere 
to ride into town on court days in a gilt coach, entertain the judges 
at dinner, and give an annual county ball. But Howard pushed 
his eccentricity so far as to look into the law-books, to see if there 
might not be something, else required at the hands of a high-sheriff. 
There -was : he was to inspect the jail ! He inspected the jail ; and 
his inspection had the unprecedented quality of being real. He 
looked; he felt; he smelt; he tasted ; he weighed ; he measured; 
he questioned. The reformation of the jails of Christendom dates 
from that incongruous act. So Jefferson, soon after his election to 
an office that made him chairman of the Senate, awoke to the fact 
that he was, from twelve years' disuse, " entirely rusty in the parlia- 
mentary rules of procedure." He had once been well versed in 
those rules. Among the many curious relics of his tireless, minute 
industry, which have been preserved to this day, is a small, well- 
worn, leather-bound manuscript volume of one hundred and five 
pages, entitled '' Parliamentary Pocket-book, " begun by him when 
he was a young lawyer, expecting soon to be a member of the par- 
liament of Virginia. This work, which contained the substance of 
ancient parliamentary law and usage, he now fished from its hiding- 
place ; and upon it, as a basis, he gradually constructed his "Manual 
of Parliamentary Practice," which still governs our deliberative 
bodies. After amending it, and adding to it for four years, aided 
by tlie learning and experience of his ancient master in the law, 
George Wythe, he left it in manuscript to the Senate, as the stand- 
ard by which he had "judged and was willing to be judged." 

The opening paragraph betrays the habit of his mind, and shows 
from what quarter he habitually expected danger : " Mr. Onslow, 
the ablest among the speakers of the House of Commons, used to 
say, It was a maxim he had often heard, when he was a j^oung 
man, from old and experienced members, that nothing tended more 
to throw power into the hand of administration, and' those who 
acted with a majority of the House of Commons, than a neglect of, 
or departure from, the rules of proceedings ; that these forms, as 



m 



528 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

instituted by our ancestors, operated as a check and control on the 
actions of the majority ; and that they were, in many instances, a 
shelter and protection to the minority against the attempts of 
power." This little Manual is a wonderful piece of work, compact 
with the brief results of wide research. This sentence startles one 
who now turns over its pages : " Whex the private interests 

OF A member are CONCERNED IN A BILL OR QUESTION, HE IS TO 
WITHDRA\^ ! " 

In 1797 it was still ten days' ride from Monticello to Philadel- 
phia. When ]Mr. Jefferson's man, Jupiter, drove his chaise round to 
the door on the 20th of February, the master did not forget that a 
few weeks before he had beer^ elected president of the Philosophical 
Society ; and, accordingly, he placed in the carriage some bones of 
the mastodon, lately come into his possession, the size of which had 
filled him with special wonder. With the Parliamentary Pocket- 
book in his trunk, and these bones under the seat, he was well 
set up in both his characters. Prom Alexandria he took the public 
coach, and sent his own vehicle home ; not omitting to record in 
his diary that the stage-fare from Alexandria to Philadeljihia was 
$11.75, — no great charge for six days' ride in February mud. Mr. 
Madison did not succeed in parrying the symptoms of ceremony ; for 
we read in a Philadelphia newspaper of the time, that on Thurs- 
daj^, the 2d of March, "the company of artillery welcomed that 
tried patriot, Thomas' Jefferson, with a discharge of sixteen rounds 
from two twelve-pounders, and a flag was displaj-ed from the 
2Jark of artillery bearing the device ' Jefferson, the Friend of the 
People.' " 

The inauguration of a new president, like the accession of a 
young prince to a throne, is naturally a time of joyous excitement; 
but the present occasion was clouded with apprehension. Every 
newspaper of those early weeks of 1797, which contained news from 
abroad, had from one to a dozen items like this: "The ship Eliza, 
on her passage from Liverpool to New York, sprang a leak, and was 
obliged to bear away to the West Indies. In sight of Martinico she 
was taken by a French privateer, and run ashore, where she was totally 
wrecked. The captain was imprisoned thirty-two days, and then 
released without trial." This from the only power in the world 
which could be regarded as the natural ally of the United States ! 
This from the native land of Lafayette ! And now the great 



ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. 529 

cLaracter wliicli had stood between contending parties, himself no 
partisan, was to withdraw from the scene, leaving the crisis to he 
dealt with by men untried in the responsibilities of government. 
Good citizens might well be anxious for their country. 

On reaching Philadelphia, Jefferson went at once to pay his 
respects to Mr. Adams, who, the next morning, returned the call, 
and started immediately the topic that was upon every man's mind 
and tongue, — the danger of a rupture with France. The president 
elect said that he was impressed with the necessity of sending an 
embassy to that country. The first wish of his heart would have 
been to intrust the mission to Jefferson ; but he supposed that was 
out of the question, as it did not seem justifiable for, a president to 
send away the person destined to take his place in case of accident 
to himself, nor decent to remove, from competition one who was a 
rival for the public favor. He had resolved, he Said, to send an 
imjjosing embassy of three distinguished persons, — Elbridge Gerry 
from New England, from Virginia James Madison, from South Caro- 
lina G. C. Pinckney. The dignity of the mission, he thought, 
would satisfy France ; and its selection from the three great divis- 
ions of the country would satisfy the people of the United States. 
Mr. Jefferson agreed with the president elect as to the impropriety 
of his leaving the post assigned him by the people, and consented 
to make known his wishes to Madison. Mr. Adams was all candor 
and cordiality on this occasion. In the elation of the hour, he 
evidently regarded Mr. Jefferson as a colleague, with whom it was 
but natural for him to consult. In his swelling moments, during 
these first days of his elevation, he liked to compare Jefferson's 
position in tlie country with that of prince-roj'al or heir-apparent 
to a throne, — much too exalted a personage to be sent on any 
mission. 

On the last day of Washington's term, Jefferson was one of the 
guests at the dinner given by the president -to the conspicuous per- 
sons of the capital with whom he had been officially connected. It 
was a merry dinner; for, on tliis occasion, he who was to lay down 
the burden of power was happier than they who were to take it up. 
On Saturday, the 4th of March, occurred the memorable scenes of the 
inauguration so often described. At eleven Mr. Jefferson, in the 
Senate Chamber, was sworn into office, assumed the chair, and deliv- 
ered the usual brief address. He concluded with a cordial tribute to 

31 



530 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 

Mr. Adams: " No one more sincerely prays that no accident may 
call me to the higher and more important functions which the Con- 
stitution eventually devolves on this oiEce. These have been justly 
confided to the eminent character which has preceded me here, whose 
talents and integrity have been known and revered by me through 
a long course of years, and have been the foundation of a cordial and 
uninterrupted friendship between us ; and I devoutly pray he may 
be long preserved for the government, the happiness, and prosperity 
of our common country." 

The Senate, with Mr. Jefferson at their head, then proceeded to 
the Representatives' Hall, where Mr. Adams took the oath, and 
delivered his robust inaugural, so worthy of him and of the occasion, 
so little appreciated by tlie party leaders who were to deceive, mis- 
lead, and destroy him. General Washington's fine sense of propri- 
ety was shown 'on this occasion in a trifling incident that caugbt 
every eye and dwelt in many memories. After Mr. Adams had left 
the chamber, the general and Mr. Jefferson rose at the same moment 
to follow him ; and Mr. Jefferson, of course, stood aside to let the 
ex-president take the lead in leaving the chamber. But the private 
citizen pointedly refused to accept the precedence over the vice- 
president. Mr. Jefferson was obliged to go first. 

That afternoon there was a mighty banquet given in honor of the 
retiring chief by the merchants of Philadelphia ; which was attended 
by the president, the vice-president, members of Congress, the cabi- 
net, the foreign ministers, and a great company of noted citizens. 
The circus was converted into a banqudting-hall, to which the corn- 
pan}' marched, two and two, from the great tavern of the day. The 
toast given by Jefferson was very significant to the men of that 
time, little as it conveys to us : " Eternal union of sentiment between 
the commerce and agriculture of our country." Benevolent readers 
will be pleased to learn, that, in accordance with a kindly custom of 
the period, "the remains of this festival were given to the prisoners 
in the jail, and the sick in the hospital, that the unfortunate and 
afflicted might also rejoice." 

Sunday passed. If we may judge from the vituperation of after- 
years, Mr. Jefferson took the liberty of attending the Unitarian 
chapel, where Dr. Priestley might then be occasionally heard, instead 
of exhibiting himself at Christ Church, which had been more politic. 

On Monday Mr. Adams and himself again dined with General 



ELECTED YICE-PEESIDENT. 531 

Washington. As they chanced to leave at the same moment, they 
walked together until their ways diverged, and Mr. Jefferson seized 
the opportunity to inform the president that Madison declined the 
French mission. The topic had evidently become an embarrassing 
one to the president. Objections, he said, in his honest, tactless 
manner, had been made to the nomination of Mr. Madison ; and he 
continued to stammer excuses till the welcome corner of Market 
Street and Fifth Street gave him an undeniable excuse for breaking 
off the conversation. 

Mr. Adams never again consulted the vice-president on a political 
measure. They exchanged punctually the civilities which tlieir situ- 
ations and their ancient friendship demanded ; but never again did 
they converse on a measure of the administration. Mr. Jefferson, 
as he strolled along Fifth Street in the silence and solitude of a 
Philadelphia evening, mused upon the cause of the sudden change 
in the president's tone on the subject of the French mission. He 
/ arrived at a probable solution of the mystery : Mr. Adams had met 
the cabinet that Monday morning for the first time. Madison to 
France ! What a proposition to make to a knot of -Federalists, sore 
and hot from the strife of 1796 ! Madison, the thorn in Hamilton's 
side for seven years, to be selected for the most conspicuous honor 
in the administration's gift by Hamilton's own satellites and jjroteges/ 
Mr. Adams, as Jefferson conjectured, rose from the council-table in 
an altered mood ; and " as he never acted on any system, but was 
always governed by the feeling of the moment," he gave up his 
dream of steering impartially between the two parties, and employ- 
ing the talents of both, in the lofty style of Washington. It is not 
given to every man to bend the bow of Ulysses ! The king and the 
heir-apparent seldom agree in politics while the king reigns ! 



CHAPTER LVI. 

Hamilton's amour with mrs. Reynolds. 

Whether the people of the United States should govern or be 
governed, or, in other words, whether America, should remain Amer- 
ica or become merely a greater Britain, — that was the issue in the 
infuriate presidential election of 1800. The issue was confused, as 
it alwaj's is, by intrigue, accident, and personality: but the people 
saw it clearly enough ; for of all the devices of man for clarifying 
and disseminating truth, nothing has yet been invented so effective 
as one of our hotly contested presidential elections. Millions of 
lies are generated only to be consumed ; and the two warring princi- 
ples stand at last clearly revealed, for each man to choose, according 
to his nature. Never once, from 1789 to 1872, have the people of v 
the United States failed to reach a decision, which, upon the whole, 
was best ; not once, little as some of us could think so on the morn- 
ing after certain elections that could be named. 

The discussion which had begun in the privacy of President 
Washington's cabinet in 1790, between American Jefferson and 
British Hamilton, at length divided the nation into two parties. 
The representative individuals who began it were now in situations 
that seemed to withdraw them from the, arena of stri'fe, — Hamilton 
a lawyer at the New York bar, Jefferson in the chair of the Senate; 
and yet it was about these two men that the strife concentrated. It 
was still Hamilton who led the party of re-action ; it was still Jef- 
ferson who inspired the Republicans, — each deeply and entirely 
convinced, that upon the supremacy of his ideas depended, not the 
welfare of America onlj'', but the happiness of man. What a might 
there is in disinterested conviction ! It sometimes invests common 
talents with a far-reaching and late-enduring power which unprin^ 
cipled genius never wields. 
532 



HAMILTON'S AMOUR WITH MRS. REYNOLDS. 533 

And it so chanced in tin's first year of Mr. Adams's presidency, 
1797, that both these individuals, without agency of their own and 
to their extreme annoyance, were invested with a new and intense 
conspicuousness. They awoke to find ''the eyes of the universe" 
fixed upon them. 

In April, 1796, in the heat of the debates upon the Jay treaty, 
Mr. Jefferson had occasion to write a long letter of business to his 
old neighbor, Mazzei, then happily settled in his native Ituly. By 
way of a friendly finish to a letter of dull detail, he appended a 
short paragraph upon politics, writing hastily and without reserves, 
as republican to republican. He told Mazzei, that, since he had left 
America, the aspect of politics had wonderfully changed. Aa 
Anglican monarchical and aristocratical party had spTung up, small 
in numbers but high in station, whose avowed object was to draw us 
over to the substance, as they had already to the forms, of the 
British government. On the side of republicanism pure an(J simple 
were these three, — the people, the planters, and the talents; 
against republicanism pure and simple, placemen, office-seekers, the 
Senate, *' all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the 
boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading 
on British capitals, speculators and holders in the banks and public 
funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and 
for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound 
parts of the British model." He added these observations : " It 
would give j'ou a fever were I to name to you the apostates who 
have gone over to these heresies, — men who were Samsons in the 
field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads 
shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to preserve 
the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils. 
But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the 
good side is so great as to leave no danger that force will ever be 
attempted against us. We have only to awake, and snap the Lili- 
putian cords with which they liave been entangling us during the 
first sleep which succeeded our labors." 

Upon receiving this letter, Mazzei translated the political para- 
graph into Italian, and had it inserted in one of the newspapers of 
Florence, as an extract from a letter from Thomas Jefferson, late 
secretary of state of the United States. The editor of the Paris 
Moniteur espied it, translated it into French, and transferred it to 



504 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

his journal. An American editor translated it back into English, 
printed it, and soon all America was ringing with it. 

It would be difficult to compress into a few lines a greater amount 
of exasperating offence than Jefferson had managed to pack into 
these; for it was not individuals who were hit, but classes, and 
classes, too, that had weapons with which to return the stroke. The 
passage had another peculiarity : to the few extreme Federalists it 
had the bitter sting of truth ; while the mass of the party honestly 
resented it as calumny. Nor could the writ-er disavow or explain it 
away, despite the errors of translation that intensified some phrases. 
Upon reflection, and after consultation with Madison, he decided to 
adhere to his ancient rule, and publish not a word of personal expla- 
nation. But nothing that Jefferson ever did or wrote in his whole 
life gave such deep, wide, and lasting offence as this hasty post- 
script, written in the heat of controversy, and published with crim- 
inal thoughtlessness by a sincere friend four thousand miles away. 
Those figures of speech which are the natural utterance of a kindled 
mind, how they delight and mislead the unconcerned bearer ! how 
they rankle in the wounds of self-love ! 

Hamilton's affair was a thousand times worse than this; and yet, 
strange to say, it gave less offence, and seemed to be sooner forgot- 
ten. To clear himself from a charge of peculation during his 
tenure of the treasury, he was obliged to publish in great detail the 
history of his amour with a married woman, named Reynolds. His 
pamphlet on this subject will be valuable to any one who may 
desire to pursue Mr. Lecky's line of investigation in ximerica, and 
get further light upon the history of morals. It is a highly inter- 
esting fact, that, A. D. 1797, one of the foremost men of the United 
States, a person who valued himself upon his moral principle, and 
was accepted by a powerful party at his own valuation in that par- 
ticular, should have felt it to be a far baser thing to cheat men of 
their money than to despoil women of their honor. In this pam- 
phlet he puts his honorable wife to an open shame, 'and publishes to 
the world the frailty of the woman who had gratified him; and this 
to refute a calumny which few would have credited. His. conduct 
in this affair throws light upon his political course. He could be 
false to women for the same reason that he could disregard the will 
of the people.i/ He did not look upon a woman as a person and an 
equal with wliom faith was to be kept, any more than he recognized 



Hamilton's amour with mrs. Reynolds. 535 

jthe people as the master and the owner whose will was law. Origi- 
nal iu nothing, he took his morals from one side of the Straits of 
Dover, and his politics from the other. 

What more amusing than the high-stepping morality of the open- 
ing of this pamphlet, where the autlior declares that the spirit of 
Jacobinism (Hamilton's word for the opinions of his opponents) 
threatens more mischief to the world than the three great scourges, 
War, Pestilence, and Famine ; and that it is, in fact, nothing other 
than " a conspiracy of Vice against Virtue ! " It was after prelud- 
ing upon this theme, that the representative of Injured Innocence 
told his story. In the summer of 1791, a woman had called at his 
house in Philadelphia, and asked to speak with him in private. As 
soon as they were alone, she had related a piteous tale, — how her 
husband, after treating her cruelly, had left her destitute, and gone 
off to live with another woman. She now desired only to get home 
to her friends in New York ; and, knowing that Colonel Hamilton 
was a New Yorker, she had ventured to come to him, as a country- 
man, and ask him to give her money enough for the journey. He 
replied that her situation was interesting, and that he was disposed 
to help her, but he had no mone^^, — a very common case with the 
secretary of the treasury. He told her to leave her address, and he 
would call or send in the evening. 

" In the evening," he says, " I put a bank-bill in my pocket, and 
went to the house. I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds, and was shown 
up stairs, at the head of which she met me, and conducted me into a 
bedroom. I took the bill out of my pocket, and gave it to her. 
Some conversation ensued, from which it quickly appeared that 
other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable. After this I 
had frequent meetings with her, most of them at my own house; 
Mrs. Hamilton with her children being absent on. a visit to her 
father." 

These ''frequent meetings," which began in July, continued until 
December, when they were rudely interrupted by the return of the 
husband, and his discovery of what had occurred in his absence. 
The honorable secretary received one morning a chaotic letter from 
Mrs. Reynolds, who had then become "Maria" to him, in which 
she announced the appalling fact, in the ladies' spelling of the 
period, that irate Reynolds " has swore if he dose not se or hear 
from you to-day, he will write Mrs. Hamilton." 



536 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

A letter not less chaotic, nor better spelled, soon arrived from Mr. 
lie^'nold.-?; and this led to an interview between the husband and the 
paramour, — not at Weehawken, but in Colonel Hamilton's house. 
The consolation which the husband desired could not be described 
as " other than pecuniary." He asked for a place under govern- 
ment. But Colonel Hamilton was never capable of the imfamj of 
saddling such a fellow-upon the public service. In the vain attempt 
to shut the man's mouth, he committed very great folly, it is true, but 
not crime: he tried to buj'- his silence with money, — with a thou- 
sand dollars, paid in two instalments ; six hundred dollars on the 
22d of December, 1791, and the remainder January 3, 1792. The 
reader knows very well what followed ; for he lives in the advanced 
year 1874, when the truth is familiar that blackmail is a 'case of 
interminable subtraction. The thousand dollars which was squeezed 
with so much difficulty out of a small salary kept the noble Rey- 
nolds quiet for fourteen days. On the 17th of January, 1792, the 
secretary of the treasury of the United States had the pleasure, of 
receiving the following note : — 

*'■' Sir I suppose j-ou will be surprised in my writing to you 
Repeatedly as I do. but dont be Alarmed for its Mrs. R. wish to 
See you. and for My own happiness and hers. I have not the 
Least Objections to your Calling, as a friend to Bouth of us. and 
must Rely intirely on your and her honnor. when I conversed with 
you last. I told you it would be disagreeable to me for you to Call, 
buti Sence, I am pritty well Convinsed, She would onely wish to See 
you as a friend, and sence I am Reconsiled to live with her, I 
would wish to do every thing for her happiness and my own, and 
Time may ware of every thing. So dont fail in Calling as Soon as 
you Can make it Conveanant. and I Rely on your befriending me 
if there should any thing otter that would be to my advantage, as 
you Express a wish to befrind me. So I am yours to Serve 

" James Reynolds." 

From this letter it appeared that Mi-. Reynolds wished to open a 
new account with a gentleman who was so free with his money. 
But the burnt child avoided the fire. Colonel Hamilton did not 
call. Late one evening, a maid-servant left at his door an epistle 
still more moving from " Maria " herself. She could " neither Eate 



Hamilton's amouk with mrs. Reynolds. 537 

nor sleep." She had been on the point of doing " the moast horrid 
acts," the thought of which made her " shuder." She felt that she 
was not long for this world ; and all she asked was to " se " him 
once more. " For God sake," she concluded, " be not so voed of all 
humannity as to deni me this Last request but if you will not Call 
some time this night I no its late but any tim between this and 
twelve A Clock I shall be up Let me Intreat you If you wont Come 
to send me a Line oh my head I can rite no more do something to 
Ease My heart or Els I no not what I shall do for so I cannot live 
Commit this to the care of my maid be not offended I beg." 

But even this tender appeal did not bring the truant to her feet. 
She wrote again two daj's after, on " Wensday Morning ten of 
Clock," imploring him " if he has the Least Esteeme for the 
unhappy Maid whos grateest fault Is loveing him that he will come 
as soon as he shall get this and till that time My breaste will be the 
seate of pain and woe." Nor did she omit the truly feminine post- 
script : " P. S. If you cannot come this Evening to stay just come 
only for one moment as I shal be Lone Mr. is going to sup with a 
friend from New York." This postscript, it to be feared, proved too 
much for the " virtue " of a man against whom the spirit of Jacob- 
inism had formed a conspiracy with vice. At least we know that 
relations between the woman and the cabinet minister were re-estab- 
lished, and that the husband promptly brought in his bill. If we 
may judge from the specimens of receipts signed James Reynolds 
which Hamilton gives in his pamphlet, we may conclude, that when- 
ever James Eeynolds felt the need of a little money, which was only 
too often, he was in the habit of applying to the honorable secretary 
of the treasury for a small loan ; which alas ! the secretary dared not 
refuse. He responded promptly too ; for we find the receipt bearing 
the same date as the begging letter. 

What a snarl for the leader of a national party to be caught in, 
in the year of a presidential election, — the wife pestering him with her 
tears and her awful letters, and the husband bleeding him every few 
weeks of a fift^'^-dollar bill, so needed for his own teeming household ! 
We cannot wonder that he should have broken out in that indec- 
orous manner, in the newspapers, against his colleague. The affair 
became loathsome beyond expression, and he could get neither peace 
nor respite. With a shabby servant-girl leaving crumpled notes at 
his door at nine o'clock in the evening, and a man of the Keynolds 



538 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

stamp, to whom he dared not deny a private interview, hanging 
round his office in the daj^'time, he could not hope long to escape 
suspicion, if he did detection ; and, as time went on, the importuni- 
ties of both became alarmingly frequent. If he abstained from 
going near the woman for a few days, he received a letter from the 
husband, begging him to call. 

"Sir I am sorry to be the barer of So disagreeable, an unhappy 
infermation. I must tell you Sir that I have bin the most unhap- 
piest man, for this five days in Existance, which you aught to be 
the last person I ever Should tell my troubls to. ever Sence the 
night you Called and gave her the Blank Paper. She has treated 
me more Cruel than pen cant paint out. and Ses that She is deter- 
mined never to be a wife to me any more, and Ses that it is a plan 
of ours, wliat has past god knows I Freely forgive you and dont 
wish to give you fear or pain a moment on the account of it. now 
Sir I hope you will give me your advise as freely as if Nothing had 
ever passed Between us I think it is in your power to make matter 
all Easjr again, and I suppose you to be that Man of fealing that 
you would wish to make every person happy Where it in your power 
I shall wate to See you at the office if its Conveuant. I am sir with 
Asteem yours 

"James Keynolds." 

Only six days passed before the husband handed in his account. 
The date of the note just given was April 17. The date of the 
following was April 23 : — 

"Sir I am sorry I am in this disagreeable sutivation which Obliges 
me to trouble j-ou So offen as I do. but I hope it wont be long 
before it will be In my power to discharge what I am indebted to 
you Nothing will give me greater pleasure I must Sir ask the loan 
of thirty dollars more from you, which I shall asteem as a particular 
favour, and you may Rest ashured that I will pay you with Strickest 
Justice, for the Reliefe you have aforded me, tlie Inclosed is the 
Receipt for the thirty dolhirs. I sliall wate at your office. Sir for 
an answer I am sir your very Humble Servant, 

"James Reynolds." 



HAMILTON'S AMOUE WITH MRS. EEYNOLDS. 539 

The connection became intolerable to the victim at last, and he 
contrived to shake it off. But Reynolds, five years after, finding 
himself in jail for debt, thought to extricate himself by selling 
Hamilton's good name to his political opponents ; and he had letters 
to show, in Hamilton's own hand, proving, that, between this dast- 
ardly and ignorant wretch and the secretary of the treasury, some 
incongruous connection involving pecuniary transactions had existed. 
It was to explain the incongruity, that, in July, 1797, Hamil- 
ton felt himself obliged to publish the pamphlet relating the rise 
and progress of this " amorous intrigue," with enough of the letters 
to show that the sinner in the case was not the Honorable Secretary 
of the Treasury, but only a weak, vain, and limited human being, 
named Alexander Hamilton. 



CHAPTER LVII. 

THE GKAND EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1797. 

Public opinion miglit have judged Hamilton with almost as 
much severity for this amour as the Federalists condemned Jeffer- 
son for his Mazzei paragraph, if public events had not given a brief 
but overwhelming ascendency to tlie political system which Hamil- 
ton represented. By the time his pamphlet had made its way 
through the remoter States, the French imbroglio assumed a charac- 
ter that destroyed in a moment (and for a moment) all that popular 
sympathy with France which had constituted a great part of the politi- 
cal capital of the Kepublican party. For a time, sny about a year, 
E-epublicanism was under a cloud; and that man was the hei'o of 
every circle who was loudest against France. Hamilton saw his 
dream of a consolidating war on the point of realization. The poor 
man was excessively vain of his military prowess, and had no more 
doubt of his eminent fitness to command an army than Lord John 
Russell was once supposed to have of his ability to command the 
Channel fleet. It was a bewildering turn in public affairs for a man 
who regarded war as the noblest vocation of human beings, who 
esteemed himself singularly endowed by nature to shine in that 
vocation, and who felt that only a war could save "social order " in 
the United States. 

It was the exploits of three French "strikers," that deceived and 
maddened the American people in 1798. Vain-glorious Americans 
pretend that strlkmg is an American invention, practised first in 
New York, and then at Albany, upon persons interested in a pend- 
ing act. "Pay me five thousand dollars," says the professional 
striker, "and your bill will pass." And no man can say whether or 
not the bill passes in consequence of the striker's influence, or 
whether the striking was or was not authorized by members. It 
540 



THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FEANCE IN 1797. 541 

was the Eastern Continent, not the Western, that originated this 
fine device. 

President Adams carried out his scheme of siding to France an 
imposing embassy of three gentlemen of the first distinction. The 
Directory had refused to receive one American plenipotentiary, 
General C. C. Pinckney, — refused even to give him "cards of hospi- 
tality," legalizing his residence in Paris ; and, finally (January 25, 
1797), notified him that he had no legal right to remain in France. 
The cause of this remarkable behavior was the Jay treaty ; or, as 
the French government styled it, " the condescension of the Ameri- 
can government to its ancient tj'rants." Imagine the effect in the 
United States of an insult so emphatic and so unprovoked ! The 
best friends of France were the most wounded and dismayed ; while 
the party in power, in extra session of Congress assembled, voted 
every thing short of downright war, and might even have precipitated 
actual hostilities, but for the overshadowing, portentou-s^restige of 
General Bonaparte. In the nick of time was published an " Order 
of the Day," dated "30 Germinal, An V" (or vulgarly, April 19, 
1797), in which that "Geaeral-en-Chef" informed his army, in five 
lines, that the preliminaries of peace had been signed the day before 
between the emperor of Austria and the French Republic. This 
brief document notified mankind that General Bonaparte, with 
resources vastly increased, was now free to direct his exclusive atten- 
tion to the war with perfidious Albion, either by way of Calais and 
Dover, or Egypt and Calcutta. This intelligence, as Jefferson 
remarked at the time, "cooled the ardent spirits," and therefore, 
instead of war, we had the grand embassy, — C. C. Pinckney, John 
Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. Pinckney and Marshall were Fed- 
eralists ; Gerry a Republican. 

How warmly Mr. Jefferson urged Mr. Gerry to accept the mission 
is worthy of remembrance, in view of its result. " If," wrote Jef- 
ferson," we engage in a war during our present passions, and our 
present weakness in some quarters, our Union runs the greatest 
risk of not coming out of that war in the shape in which it enters it. 
My reliance for our preservation is in your acceptance of this mis- 
sion. I know the tender circumstances which will oppose themselves 
to it. But its duration will be short, and its reward long. You 
have it in your power, by accepting and determining the character 
of the mission, to secure the present peace and eternal union of 



542 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

your country. If you decline, on motives of private pain, a substi- 
tute maybe named who has enlisted his passions in the present con- 
test, and, by the preponderance of his vote in the mission, may 
entail on us calamities, your share in which, and your feelings, will 
outweigh whatever pain a temporary absence from your family could 
give you." 

Elhridge Gerry had now been in the service of his country for 
nearly a quarter of a century. Before the Revolutionary War, he 
was a thriving merchant at Marblehead, a town situated on a point 
that extends two or three miles out into Massachusetts Bay, and was 
inhabited at that time only by fishermen and merchants. Being a 
mercliant and a man of substance, he naturally took the lead in 
such a community during the agitation which preceded the Revolu- 
tionary War. He was a just, public-spirited, thouglitful, and reso- 
lute man, a great friend and constant correspondent of Samuel 
Adams, who was the soul and centre of the opposition to the king 
in Massachusetts for twenty years. , 

*' The whole business of life," WTote Gerry to Adams, wlien the 
news of the Boston Port Bill reached Marblehead, " seems involved 
in one great question, What is best to he done for our country ? '^ 

That sentence perfectly describes both the feelings and the con- 
duct of Elbridge Gerry at that period. Politics became, indeed, the 
whole business of his life ; and, after serving his State in various 
honorable capacities, he found himself a member of the Continental 
Congress, in which character he signed the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. He served during the gloomiest period of the war, on 
that most laborious and responsible committee which had charge of 
the finances of the country. As the war went on, the forty gentlemen 
who composed the Congress of the United States were reduced .to 
sad straits. At one period, when a dollar in gold was worth four 
thousand in paper, if, indeed, it could be said to have any value, Mr. 
Gerry described his own situation thus : — 

"I now owe one hundred, and forty-seven dollars (gold) for 
board, and some little borrowed of my landlady, besides twenty-six 
borrowed for every-day expenses, and perhaps sixteen more to tailors 
and shoemakers. How, under Heaven, am I to get this with 
provincial paper, which does not pass here for any thing at all, and 
is next to nothing where it was issued ? You speak of my soon 



THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1797. 543 

being at home ! . I own no horse, or I might ride away from these 
great debts, and ask charity on the road for a delegate from Massa- 
chusetts, to enable him to reach home." 

The supreme power of the country, nevertheless, and the control 
of two armies, were in the liands of these forty men who were trou- 
bled to pay their board. Gerry took it in good part, and made a 
joke of it. He guarded the public treasury with vigilance and 
sternness. It was he, in fact, who, as chairman of the treasury- 
board, rejected the corrupt claims of General Arnold, which kindled 
the anger of the traitor, and caused him to appeal to Congress from 
Gerry's decision, Svith severe remarks upon the conduct of the chair- 
man of the financial committee. Mr. Gerry replied to Arnold's 
abuse with a remark which some public servants of the present day 
might use with propriety. 

"If," said he, "the faithful discharge of official duty, unpleasant 
enough in itself, is to bring with it the liability of personal attack 
from men who have neither honesty in their public dealings nor 
courtesy in private life, it might be well to abolisli all guards upon 
the treasury, and admit rapacity and crime to help themselves at 
pleasure." 

Elbridge Gerry, though a strictly virtuous and honorable man, 
was one of those who are sometimes described as " difficult to get 
along with." He had a spiritual malady, not uncommon in New 
England at that period, which still troubles some Yankees, otherwise 
excellent : He was morbidly suspicious. He was prone to attribute 
evil motives. His companions felt tliat he was doubtful of their 
sincerity ; and he did indeed habitually expect public men to abuse 
their trust. John Adams was full of this untrusting, distrusting 
spirit ; and I have often wondered how it could be, that men so hon- 
est and sincere as John Adams and Elbridge Gerry could instinc- 
tively attribute to other men baseness of which they were themselves 
incapable. Along with this suspiciousness, there was in Elbridge 
Gerry a tenacity of mind which caused him to adhere to a ground- 
less suspicion or a trifling right as firmly as to intej-ests the most 
sacred and the most important. In the midst of the revolutionary 
period. Congress having refused him the ayes and noes on a motion, 
he protested against the refusal as a wrong done to his State ; and, 
after waiting a month for Congress to redress his grievance, he aban- 



544 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

doned Lis seat, and referred the subject to the legislature of Massa- 
chusetts. Nor, -when re-elected to Congress, would he accept the 
seat until the affair had been adjusted. 

He was one of the original founders of our Democratic party, — - 
one of those, who, even before the war ended, had a dread of increas- 
ing the power of the central government, and a horror of the 
parade and pageantry which called to mind this vice-regal system. 

At the close of the war, when the treaty of peace was presented 
to Congress for its consideration, there were only three members in 
the body who had signed the Declaration of Independence, — Mr. 
Jefferson, Mr. Gerr}^, and Mr. Ellery of Rhode Island; all of whom 
were named upon the committee to whom the treaty was referred. 
He witnessed the memorable scene of Washington's resigning his 
commission at Annapolis. He served also in the Constitutional 
Convention of 1787. 

But the great event of his life, and that which alone will cause 
him to be remembered in history, was the part which he took in 
preserving peace, in 1798, between the United States and France. 

After the departure of the envoys in August, there was a lull in 
the storm of politics ; and several months of expectation passed, 
increasing as time went on, until the mere delay created alarm. 
The summer passed, the autumn glided by, winter began. Congress 
convened, the winter ended, and still the dreadful question of peace 
or war remained unanswered. What of our envoys ? How has our 
sublime embassy been received? It was not until it had been gone 
seven months, that any authoritative answer could be given to such 
inquiries, even by the president. And then what an answer! Let 
us accompany these gentlemen on their mission. 

It was on the 4th of October, 1797, that the three envoys found 
themselves in Paris, — two having come fresh from the United 
States, and General Pinckney from Holland. On that very first 
morning they had an experience which was a fit prelude to what 
was to come. The musicians of the Directory, in accordance with 
ancient custom (" everybody does it, my dear sir "), called upon 
them for a present, and got from each, as Mr. Gerry reports, " fif- 
teen or twenty guineas." Next, a deputation of fish-women, also 
in accordance with ancient custom, presented themselves for the 
same purpose. " When the ladies," wrote Mr. Gerry, " get sight 
of a minister, as they did of my colleagues, they smother him with 



THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1797. 545 

kisses." But Mr. Gerry escaped this part of the penalty by send- 
ing one of the secretaries of the mission, Major Rutledge, to "nego- 
tiate for me." Gerry paid the guineas, and Rutledge,.it is to he 
presumed, drew the kisses. 

The next morning business began. The envoys sent a messen- 
ger to notify verbally M. de Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign 
Affairs, of their arrival in Paris, and to ask him to name a time 
when he would be at leisure to receive one of their secretaries with 
a formal and written notification. Answer: The next day, at two 
o'clock. Major Rutledge, punctual to the time, delivered the usual 
letter, announcing the object of the embassy, and requesting the min- 
ister to appoint an hour for them to present their letters of credence. 
To the cordial and stately letter of the three envoys, Talleyrand gave 
a verbal reply : " The day after to-morrow at one o'clock." They 
waited upon him at the hour appointed. He was not at home ! His 
chief secretary informed them that he had been compelled to meet the 
Directory, but would be glad to see them at three o'clock. They 
called again at three o'clock. He was "engaged with the Portuguese 
minister;" and the envoj's waited till he was disengaged, about ten 
minutes. They were then introduced, and presented their letters, 
which the minister read and kept. He then informed them that the 
Directory had required him to draw up a report upon the relations of 
Prance with the United States, which he was then engaged upon, 
and would complete in a few days ; when we would let them know 
"what steps wei-e to follow." They asked him if, in the mean time, 
the usual cards of hospitality would be necessary. Yes, and they 
should be sent to them. He rang his bell, told his secretary to 
make tliera out. The envoys then withdrew ; and, on the day fol- 
lowing, the cards were brought to them. 

Ten days passed. No letter from M. de Talleyrand. 

But, on the morning of October 18, the strikers began their 
attempts upon the envoys. A certain " Mr. W." called upon Gen- 
eral Pinckney, and informed him that " a Mr. X was a person of 
considerable credit and reputation, and that the envoys might place 
great reliance upon him ; " and, in the evening of the same day, 
who should happen to drop in upon the envoys but the same Mr. X? 
After sitting a while, this Unknown Quantity whispered to General 
Pincknej'- that he was the bearer of a message to him from M. de 
Talleyrand. The general immediately showed the message-bearer 



546 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

into tlie next room, and lent an attentive ear to his communication, 
which was to this effect : M. de Talleyrand, who had a great regard 
for the American people, was very desirous to promote a reconcilia- 
tion between them and France, and was ready, in confidence, strict 
confidence, to suggest a jilan which he thought would answer the 
purpose. " I shall be glad to hear it," said the envoy. Mr. X 
resumed : The Directory was exceedingly irritated at some pas- 
sages of the president's speech. First, those passages must be 
" softened." That was essential, even to the mere reception of the 
envoi's by the Directory. Then the United States must lend some 
money to France. But, besides this, " a sum of money was 
required for tlie poclcefs of the Directory and ministers. 'What 
passages of the president's speech have given offence ? ' asked Gen- 
eral Pinckney. Mr. X did not know. ' "What amount of loan is 
expected ? ' Mr. X could not tell. ' How much for the pockets of 
the Directory?'" On this point, and on this only, the striker 
possessed exact information : " Twelve hundred thousand francs," 
or, sa}', a matter of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, gold ! 

In the secret recesses of liis soul, it is to be presumed, General 
Pinckney whistled. But, being on duty, he only said, that he 
could not so much as take these propositions into consideration, 
until he had consulted his colleagues. He consulted his colleagues. 
Their answer was : Let Mr. X meet us all face to face ; and, to avoid 
mistakes, let him reduce his propositions to writing. Mr. X con- 
senting, he came the next evening, and submitted in writing the 
same " suggestions." He was careful to explain, on this occasion, 
that his communication did not come directly from M. de Talley- 
rand : Oh, no ! but from " a. gentleman in whom M. de Talleyrand 
had great confidence." Other interviews followed ; and, at length, 
the envoys had the pleasure of meeting that very gentleman in whom 
M. de Talleyrand had so much confidence. He did but confirm what 
Mr. X had said. " You can have your treaty, gentlemen," said he ; 
" but I will not disguise from you, that, satisfaction being made 
(softening the president's speech), the essential part of the treaty 
remains to be adjusted : moxey is necessart ; much money." 

For a month or more, this head striker kept coming and going, 
making various propositions, and pretending to bring from Talley- 
rand various suggestions ; but always the burden of his song was, 
^he douceur ; the loan ; money; much money ! The envoys, hav- 



THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FEANCE IN 1797. 547 

ing once for all declined to entertain any proposition of that nature, 
fought shy of the subject, and turned a deaf ear to hints. Take the 
following as a sample of these lofty conversations : — 

Head Striker. Gentlemen, you do not speak to the point. 
The point is money ! It is expected you will ofter money. 

Envoys. We have spoken to that point very explicitly : we have 
given an answer. 

Head Striker. No : you have not. What is your answer ? 

Envoys. It is No, no ; not a sixpence ! 

Head Striker. Think of the dangers which threaten your 
country. Would it not be prudent, even though you may not 
make a loan to the nation, to interest an influential friend in your 
favor? Consider the character of the Directory: they care nothing 
for the justice of the case ; they can only be reached by a judicious 
application of money. 

Envoys. We have no proof of this, even if we were disposed to 
give the money. 

Head Striker. When you employ a lawyer, you give him a fee 
without knowing whether the cause can be gained or lost. It is 
necessary to have a lawyer, and you pay for his services whether 
those services are successful or not. So, in the present state of 
things, the money must be advanced for the good offices the individ- 
uals are to render, whatever may be the effect of those offices. 

Envoys. There is no parallel in the cases ; for the lawyer cannot 
command success. But the Directory has but to order that no more 
vessels should be seized, and to release those now held, and there 
could be no opposition to the order. 

Head Striker. All the members of the Directory are not dis- 
posed to receive your money. Merlin, for example, is paid from 
another quarter, and would touch no part of your douceur. 

Envoys. We have understood that Merlin is paid by the priva- 
teers. 

Head Striker (nodding assent). You pay money to obtain peace 
with the Indians and with the Algerines; and it is doing no more 
to pay France for peace. Does not your government know that 
nothing is to be obtained here without money ? 

Envoys. Our government has not even suspected such a state of 
things. 



548 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Head Striker (with an appearance of surprise). There is not au 
American in Paris who cannot give you that information. 

The gentleman, with what the envoys in their despatch styled 
"vast perseverance," continued to urge this view upon them, return- 
ing to ''the point" again and again; they ever adhering to their 
original reply, "Xot a sixpence." It was General Pinckney who 
afterwards converted that homely Not a Sixpence into an electric 
and immdrtal phrase, " Millions for Defence, but not a Cent for 
Tribute." \ At the end of thirty days, the envoys seemed no nearer 
recognition than on the day when the fishwomen had smothered 
them with kisses. 

Elbridge Gerry alone had known Talleyrand in the United States. 
One of the mysterious go-betweens informed him, one daj', that M. 
de Tallej^rand had expected to meet and converse with the envoys 
individually. Mr. Gerry reported this intimation to his colleagues, 
who thought that he might, considering his acquaintance witji the 
minister, call upon him. He did so. They conversed freely upon 
the relations of the two countries ; and Mr. Gerry thus learned pre- 
cisely what the Directory expected as conditions preliminary to a 
treaty : 1, An apology for certain expressions in the president's 
speech ; as when he said, France must be convinced " we a,re not a 
degraded peoj^le," " fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign 
influence." 2, A voliiiifari/ loan of fifteen 'or sixteen million florins. 
Nothing was said touching a douceur. Mr. Gerry having reported 
the conversation to his colleagues, they all agreed that neither of 
these preliminaries was admissible, — no apology, and not a six- 
pence ; and they caused this information to be conveyed to Talley- 
rand by one of the mj'sterious emissaries. But, in recognition of 
Mr. Gerry's call, Talleyrand invited him to one of his diplomatic 
dinners. Mr. Gerry went to the dinner, and, in return, gave Talley- 
rand a dinner. No progress, however, was made in the business of 
the mission, and Mr. Gerry declined further civilities. 

For six months the envoys vainly endeavored to bring the Direc- 
tory to reason. From first to last, the cry was, Money, money, 
money ! " We are engaged in a death-grapple with our only foe, 
your foe, liberty's foe, mankind's foe : we lent you money when 
you were in a similar situation ; lend us some in our struggle." 
Such was the substance of the later messages from the Directory. 



THE GEAND EMBASSY TO FEANCE LN" 1797. 549 

And, above the uproar of events, Thomas Paine's voice made itself 
heard, expressing exultation at the proposed descent upon England, 
and offering material aid toward it. Not much, it is true ; but 
enough to create a " scene " in the Council of Five Hundred, and 
stimulate the loan. The chairman of that excitable body read aloud 
Paine's letter on the 31st of Januarj", 1798 ; in which he said, that, 
although in his present circumstances he could not subscribe to the 
invasion loan, yet his economy enabled him to make a small dona- 
tion. "I send one hundred livres, and, with it, all the wishes of 
my heart for the success of the descent, and a voluntary offer of 
any service I can render to promote it. There will he no lasting 
peace for France, nor for the world, until the tyranny and corrup- 
tion of the English government be abolished, and England, like 
Italj^, becomes a sister republic." This letter was received with 
acclamations, and unanimously ordered to be printed. 

But the American envoys refused to take the hint. "No," they 
replied in substance, " a loan to France will embroil us with Eng- 
land." " Well, then," rejoined Talleyrand, " make us a loan ijciya- 
ble after the loarP On this last proposition the envoys differed in 
opinion ; Marshall and Pinckney rejecting it as not fit to be enter- 
tained, Gerry willing to "open negotiations on the basis" of such a 
loan. The difference proved irreconcilable ; and, after numberless 
attempts to arrange the difficulty, Talleyrand notified the envoys 
that the two gentlemen who refused to consider the proposition 
might expect to receive their passports, but Mr. Gerry was desired 
to remain. Gerry replied, that he had no authority to conclude 
any thing apart from his colleagues : he could only, in their absence, 
confer with the French minister unofificiallj^, and communicate with 
his own government as a private citizen. Messrs. Marshall and 
Pinckney departed. Mr. Gerry, eager as he was to rejoin his family, 
and foreseeing the ruin to his affairs from his prolonged absence, 
which actually occurred, was induced to stay. Talleyrand officially 
informed him, " by order of the Director}'," that his departure from 
France would be instantly followed by a declaration of war; which, 
if he remained, would be withheld until he could hear from his gov- 
ernment. 



CHAPTER LVIII. 

HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 

And so this weighty embassy, this grand and magnanimous 
endeavor to restore the ancient friendship between two estranged 
nations, seemed to end pitifully in an intrigue to get a little money. 
French cruisers had despoiled American commerce of many millions 
of dollars ; and a demand was now made of millions more, before 
the claim for redress would be listened to ! Half a dozen corrupt 
men, whirled aloft in the storm of the Revolution, committed this 
outrage ; but to the people of the United States, remote from Europe, 
unversed in its tortuous and childish politics, what could it seem but 
the act of France? For a short time France had few friends in the 
United States ; and the extremists of the Federalist party, led Ky 
Hamilton, had every tiling their own way. 

Judge of the effect of this intelligence upon the public mind by 
events: Gerry recalled ; Marshall received homelike a conqueror; 
meetings everywhere; addresses "poured into" the president's office 
from every town, ''ojffering life and fortune;" a navy department 
created; a navy voted; guns ordered; small arms purchased to a 
vast amount ; an army of ten thousand regulars, and any number of 
militia authorized, i7i case war was declared, or the country invaded; 
Washington induced to accept the command as lieutenant-general ; 
three major-generals, and nine brigadiers commissioned ; Hamilton 
nominally second in command, but practically commander-in-chief; 
the fortification of harbors begun ; merchant vessels authorized to 
arm and to resist French men-of-war ; naval commanders ordered to 
seize and bring in any French vessel which had molested, or was 
suspected of being about to molest, American ships; the president 
authorized to suspend commercial intercourse between France and 
the United States. In a word, the power and resources of the 

550 



HAMILTON EVIPEOVES THE OPPOETTJNITY. 551 

country were placed at the disposal of the president, to be by him 
employed in waging war against France, at his discretion. Hamil- 
ton saw the dream of his life about to be realized, — a war, in which 
he should win the only distinction he valued, — military glory, — 
and, employ, at least, the i^restige of a victorious sword on behalf of 
what he was accustomed to style '* social order." All this year 1798, 
he was in earnest, confidential correspondence with Miranda, the 
South American patriot, who was in England striving to unite 
William Pitt and Alexander Hamilton, or, in other words, the 
government of England and the United States, in an expedition to 
invade and wrest from Spain her American colonies. 

This was to Hamilton a captivating scheme, as it was a few years 
later to Aaron Burr. But Hamilton, ardently as he cherished it, 
expressly stipulated that he could have nothing to do with it, "unless 
patronized by the government of this country." The country, he 
wrote in August, 1798, was not quite ready for the undertaking ; 
" but we ripen fast." The plan, he thought, should be this : A 
fleet of Great Britain, an army of the United States, a government 
for the liberated territory agreeable to both the co-operators. Mr. 
Pitt, it seems, was decided for the scheme. Miranda replied to 
Hamilton's August letter in October. *' Your wishes are in some 
sort fulfilled,-" wrote the South American; "since they have agreed 
here that no English troops are to be employed on shore, seeing that 
the auxiliary laud forces should be American only, while the naval 
force shall be purely English. All difficulties have vanished, and 
we only await the fiat of your illustrious president to set out like a 
flash. "y To this point Hamilton had brought the mad scheme with- 
out the illustrious president knowing any thing of it. 

But even this was not the wildest nor the worst of Hamilton's 
misuse of the transient power which circumstances gave him in 
1798. What shall be said of his attempt to fasten upon the United 
States the stupid and shameful repressive system of George III. ? 
What of the Alien Laws, inspired by him, approved by him, passed 
by his adherents ? The mere rumor of the intention to pass such 
laws sent shiploads of French and Irish exiles hurrying home, and 
prevented worthy men from seeking needful refuge here. Kosci- 
uszko and Volney dejjarted ; Priestley was not deemed safe; noble 
Gallatin was menaced. By these Alien Laws, the wonder and 
opprobrium of American politics, servile copies of Pitt's servile 



552 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

originals, the president could order away " all such aliens as he 
should judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United 
States;" and the alien who disobeyed the order was liable to three 
years' imprisonment. Other clauses and amendments placed the 
entire foreign population of the United States, and all who might 
in future seek their shores, under strictest surveillance] and, in case 
of war with France, every Frenchman not naturalized was to leave 
the country, or be forcibly put out of it. 

But even tliis was not so monstrous as the Sedition Law, also 
borrowed from recent British legislation. Five j'ears' imprison- 
ment and five thousand dollars' fine for conspiring to oppose any 
measure passed by Congress, or for attempting or advising a riot or 
insurrection, whether " the advice or attempt should have the pro- 
posed effect or not." Imprisonment for two years, and a fine of 
two thousand dollars, for writing, speaking, or publishing " any 
false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the 
government of the United States, or either house of the Congress 
of the United States, or the president of the United States, with 
intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said 
Congress, or the said president; or to bring them, or either, of 
them, into contempt or disrepute ; or to excite against them, or 
either or any of tliem, the hatred of the good people of tlie United 
States; or to stir up sedition within the United States; or to 
excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting 
any law of the United States." Is it not incredible ? But I have 
open before me, at this moment, a ponderous law-book of seven 
hundred and twenty-one large pages, two-thirds filled with "■ State 
Trials " under the Alien and Sedition Laws. 

To these base imitations the Federalists added an originality that 
surpassed in refined absurdity any thing devised by Pitt or exe- 
cuted by Castlereagh. A very worthy, benevolent physician. Dr. 
George Logan of Philadelphia, appalled at the prospect of two 
friendly nations being thus cruelly misled into a bloody war, scraped 
together a little money with much difficulty, and went to France to 
try and prevent, by purely moral means, by mere remonstrance and 
persuasion; a calamity so dire and so unnecessar3^ He discovered 
by conversations with Talleyrand and others, and so reported, that 
there was nothing the French government so little desired as war 
with the United States. To parry this blow, the Hamiltonians 



HAMILTON ESIPEOVES THE OPPOETUNITY. 553 

passed what was called, in party parlance, the Logan Law, — five 
thousand dollars' fine and three years' imprisonment to any future 
Logan, or any person who " should carry on any verbal or written 
correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government, or any 
ofiicer or agent thereof, with an intent to influence the measures or 
conduct of any foreign government, or any officer or agent thereof, 
in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States." 
Hamilton was not going to be balked of his war and his Miranda pro- 
jee-t by any sentimental Quaker; least of all, by one for whom Jeffer- 
son had procured a safe conduct, and provided with a certificate of 
citizenship ! Dr. Logan won great honor by this worthy and useful 
attempt; and in 1810, after an honorable public career in Penn- 
sylvania, he went to England to endeavor, by the same means, to 
prevent war between the United States and Great Britain. 

From his lofty seat in the chair of the Senate, Jefferson surveyed 
the momentary triumph of the re-actionists, and prepared to frus- 
trate their intentions. Not for a moment was he deceived concern- 
ing the real disposition of France. One of the first letters that he 
wrote, after reading the despatches of the envoys, contains these 
words: "You will perceive that they have been assailed by swin- 
dlers, whether with or without the participation of Talleyrand is 
not apparent. But that the Directory knew any thing of it is 
neither proved nor probable." The lapse of seventy-five years has 
added little to our knowledge of that intrigue. "Assailed by 
swindlers, " — that is about all we are sure of at this moment. In 
reckoning up the wrongs inflicted by France upon his country, he 
ruled out, therefore, all that mass of curious dialogue, — thirty-six 
pages of cipher, — between the envoys and the individuals whom 
Mr. Adams considerately named X, Y, Z, and who are at once 
named, and explained to modern ears by the word strikers. Hence, 
liis position and that of his friends, Madison, Gallatin, Monroe, 
Giles, and the rest of the Republican forlorn hope: "The peace- 
party will agree to all reasonable measures of internal defence, but 
oppose all external preparations." With regard to the Alien and 
Sedition Laws, he thought they were an experiment to ascertain 
whether the people would submit to measures distinctly contrary to 
the Constitution. If the experiment succeeded, the next thing 
would be a life presidency; then an hereditary presidency; then 
a Senate for life. " Nor/' said he, October, 1798, " can I be confi- 



554 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSOlf. 

dent of their failure, after the dupery of which our countrymen 
have shown themselves susceptible." 

He soon, however, had new evidence of the truth of the words he 
had spoken to his Albemarle neighbors on returning from Prance in 
1790 : " The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is 
the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this 
may sometimes err 5 but its errors are honest, solitary, and short- 
liveciy 

How he toiled and schemed to enlighten the public mind at this 
crisis, his letters of the time reveal, and the hatred of the enemies 
of freedom attest. He was the soul of the opposition. By long, 
able, earnest letters to leading public men in many States, he 
roused the dormant and restrained the impetuous. He induced 
good writers on the Eepublican side, Madison above all, to compose 
the right articles for the press. Madison, overpowered in Congress, 
and regarding the Constitution as set aside, and no longer any 
restraint upon an arrogant and exulting majority, had retired to 
the legislature of Virginia, as a general falls back to make a new 
stand in the fastnesses of his native, familiar hills. "Every man," 
wrote Jefferson to him in Februarj^, 1799, " must lay his purse and 
his pen under contribution. As to the former, it is possible I may be 
obliged to assume something for you. As to the latter, let me pray 
and beseech you to set apai^ a certain portion of every post-day to 
write what maj^ be proper for the public. Send it to me while here; 
and when I go away I will let you know to whom you may send, 
so that your name shall be sacredly secret. You can render such 
incalculable services in this way as to lessen the effect of our loss 
of your presence here." At the same time Jeff'erson, acting on 
behalf of a club of choice spirits to which he belonged, endeavored 
to induce Madison to publish the notes taken by him of the debates 
in the Convention of 1787. The project failed. The work was, 
indeed, too voluminous, and yet all too brief, for the purpose of 
recalling the public mind to a sense of constitutional obligation, 
• And what did the Hamiltons of the day care for the intentions of 
that convention ? Every pen, however, that could be used with 
effect against the military faction, Jeff'erson sought out, and stimu- 
lated ; urging upon his friends the powerlessness of blackguard 
vituperation, if met by good sense, and strong, clear, dignified 
reasoning. 



HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 655 

He restraiued as well as impelled. In tlie midst of the war-fury 
of May, 1798, John Taylor of Caroline thought the time had come 
for Virginia and North Carolina to begin to think of setting up for 
themselves. ISTo, said Jefferson : " if, on a temporary superiority of 
one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal 
government can ever exist. If to rid ourselves of the present rule of 
Massachusetts and Connecticut, we break the Union, will the evil 
stop there ? Suppose the New England States alone cut off, will our 
nature be changed? Are we not men still to the south of that, and 
with all the passions of men ? Immediately we shall see a Pennsyl- 
vania and a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and 
the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit. What 
a game, too, will the one 'party have in their hands, by eternally 
threatening the other, that, unless they do so and so, they will join 
their Northern neighbors ! If we reduce our Union to Virginia and 
North Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between 
the representatives of these two States, and they will end by break- 
ing into their simple units. Seeing, therefore, that an association of 
men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never 
yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town 
meeting or a vestry, seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel 
with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that pur- 
pose than to see our bickerings transferred to others." 

No language can overstate the boiling fury of party passion then. 
Social intercourse between members of the two parties ceased, and 
old friends crossed the street to avoid saluting one another. Jeffer- 
son declined invitations to the usual gatherings of " society," and 
spent his leisure hours in the circle that met in the rooms of the 
Philosophical Societj^, ever longing for the end of the session and the 
sweet tranquillity of his home. " Here," he writes to his daughter 
Martha, in February, 1798, " your letters serve like gleams of light, 
to cheer a dreary scene, where envy, hatred, malice, revenge, and all 
the worst passions of men, are marshalled, to make one another as 
miserable as possible. .1 turn from this with pleasure, to contrast it 
with your fireside, where the single evening I passed at it was worth 
more than ages here." Agaii;i, in May : " Eor you to feel all the 
happiness of your quiet situation, you should know the rancorous 
passions which tear every breast here, even of the sex which should 
be a stranger to them. Politics and party hatreds destroy the hap- 



556 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

piness of every being here. They seem, like salamanders, to consider 
fire as tlieir element." And again, in February, 1799 : " Your 
letter was, as Ossian says, or would say, like tlie bright beams of the 
moon on the desolate heath. Environed here in scenes of constant 
torment, malice, and obloquy, worn down in a station where no eifort 
to render service can avail any thing, I feel not that existence is a 
blessing but when something recalls my mind to my family or 
farm." 

If a man so placid as Jefferson was moved so deeply, we cannot 
wonder at the frenzy of nervous and excitable spirits. President 
Adams seemed at times almost beside himself Many readers 
remember the remarkable account given by him of scenes in the 
streets of Philadelphia, on what he calls " my fast day," May 9, 
179S : " When Market Street was as full as men could stand by one 
another, and even before my door ; when some of my domestics, in 
frenz}'^, determined to sacrifice their lives in my defence ; when all 
were ready to make a desperate sally among the multitude, and 
others were with difficulty and danger dragged back by the others; 
when I myself judged it prudent and necessary to order chests of 
arms from the war-office to be brought through by-lanes and back- 
doors ; determined to defend m}'' house at the expense of my life, 
and the lives of the few, very few, domestics and friends within it." 
This record was mere midsummer madness. On referring to the 
Philadelphia newspapers of the time, I read in Claypoole, of May 11, 
1798, that " the Fast was observed with a 'decency and solemnity 
never before exhibited on a similar occasion." 

There was, indeed, a slight disturbance. For the warning of stu- 
dents, and particularly for the benefit of those who may hereafter 
investigate the laws govekxing the generation of falsehood, 
I will copy two newspaper accounts of Mr. Adams's terrible riot. 
Claypoole, May 11 : '* After the solemnities of the day were ended, 
towards evening, a number of butcher-boys made their appearance at 
the State House garden with French cockades in their hats. Some 
disturbance ensued; but, several of them being taken up and com- 
mitted to jail, order was restored, and tranquillity reigned through 
the night." The following is from another Philadelphia paper, the 
Merchants' Daily Advertiser, May 10, 1798 : " About six o'clock 
information was received at the mayor's office, that a number of per- 
sons were marching about the city in a very disorderly manner, with 



HAMILTON IMPROVES THE 0PP0RTT7NITY. 557 

French cockades in their hats. A short time after, the mayor, with 
the secretary of state, the attorney-general, and one of the aldermen, 
being at the attorney-general's office, were informed that thirty or 
forty persons of the above description were close at hand : they 
accordingly went out to disperse them. Upon the appearance of the 
civil officers, the mob took out their cockades and dispersed. How- 
ever, one fellow, more hardy than the rest, persisted in keeping in 
his cockade, and swore he would not leave the ground, in consequence 
of which he was committed to prison. Several of these persons, after 
they had been dispersed, are said to have assembled again in differ- 
ent parts of city ; but the spirited exertions of the citizens soon put 
an end to the business. The cavalry paraded through the city dur- 
ing the night ; and a number of young men, who voluntarily offered 
themselves to the mayor as guai'ds to the military stores, mint, &c., 
were accepted, and stationed at their posts under proper officers. At 
the time this paper went to press (three o'clock in the morning), we 
could not learn that any fresh attempt had been made to disturb the 
public tranquillit}'." 

Mr. Adams might have spared himself such an alarm. He was 
riding then upon the topmost wave of popularity. The onlj'' trace of 
opposition to the war measures which I can discover in the press 
during that month, except in the Congressional debates, is a toast 
given at the annual banquet of the Tammany Societj^ of New York: 
" May the Old Tories, and all who wish to engage the United States 
in a war with any nation, realize the felicity they anticipate by 
being placed in front of the first battle." This sentiment was hon- 
ored by an extraordinary number of cheers, even "thirteen." 'Nev- 
ertheless, Mr. Adams was safe in his house. All men can be driven 
mad by outrage ; but riot and violence are the natural and familiar 
resort of Old Tories. It is of the essence of republicanism to prevail 
by arguments addressed to the conscience and understanding. 

The conduct of the Republican leaders,- in this year of supreme' 
trial, was temperate, patriotic, and wise. They saw the Constitution 
of their country, even its most cherished and sacred provisions, 
those which made the United States an asylum to the elite of the 
nations, and those which secured to thought a free expression, — 
even those they saw trampled under foot. Their resort was to the 
reason and conscience of their fellow-citizens : they prepared to 
repeat the wise and humane tactics of the period preceding the 



I 

658 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

Revolution, — eleven years of remonstrance and entreaty. In Octo- 
ber, 1798, two Republicans, George Nicholas of Kentucky, and Wil- 
son C. Nicholas of Virginia, met at J\Tonticello, to consult their 
chief upon the situation. These brothers, like Madison, had retired 
from Congress to endeavor to make head in the legislatures of their 
States against the bold, blind, arrogant men who controlled the gov- 
ernment. The result of their deliberations was the " Kentucky 
Resolutions," draughted by Jefferson, and the "Virginia Resolutions," 
draughted by Madison ; by the passage of which the legislatures of 
those States declared that the Alien and Sedition Laws, being con- 
trai-y to the plainest letter of the Constitution, were " altogether 
void and of no force." Jefferson's draught uttered only the simple 
and obvious truth, when it said that " these and successive acts of 
the same nature, unless arrested at the threshold, will necessarily 
drive these States into revolution and blood;" "for this common- 
wealth is determined, as it doubts not its oo-States are, to submit to 
undelegated, and consequently unlimited power, in no man or body 
of men on earth." The last of the Kentucky Resolutions provided 
for a Committee of Conference and Correspondence, who should 
have in charge to exchange information and sentiments with the 
legislatures of other States. 

One would have expected Hamilton to pause and reconsider his 
course upon reading such a weighty and cogent protest as this. He 
did not. His was the unteachable mind of a Scotch Jacobite. His 
response to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 is pub- 
lished at length in his works, in the form of his annual political 
programme for 1799, addressed to Jonathan Dayton, long the 
speaker of the House, and then about to enter the Senate. Circum- 
stances, he said, aided by the extraordinary exertions of " the friends 
of government," had, indeed, gained something for "the side of 
men of information and property ; " but, after all, " public opinion 
tias not been ameliorated," and "sentiments dangerous to social 
happiness have not been diminisl^ed." The Kentucky and Virginia 
Resolutions could be considered, he thought, "in no other light than 
as an attempt to change the government;" and it was "stated" 
that ''the faction" in Virginia was preparing to follow up hostile 
words by hostile acts, and was actually gathering arms, stocking 
arsenals, and levying new taxes. In these circumstances, the "sup- 
porters of government," while preparing to meet force with force, . 



HAMILTON IIVIPROVES THE OPPOE-TITNITY. 559 

should adopt "vigorous raeasuyes of counteraction," "surround the 
Constitution with more ramparts," and thus " disconcert its 
enemies." 

He advised the following measures : 1. The division of each 
State into small judicial districts (Connecticut, for example, into 
four), with a federal judge in each, appointed by the president, for 
the trial of offenders against the general government. 2. The 
appointment by the president in each county of " conservators or 
justices of the peace, with only ministerial functions," a,in\ 2^ai(l hy 
fees only, in order to give efficacy to laws which the local magis- 
trates were indisposed to execute. 3. The keeping up of the army 
and navy nearly on the scale adopted in view of war with France. 
4. A military academy. 5. The establishment of government man- 
ufactories of every article needful for the supply of an army. 6. The 
prompt calling out of the militia by new laws, "to suppress unlaw- 
ful combinations and insurrections." 7. " The subdivision of the 
great States ought to be a cardinal point in the federal policy ; " 
and Congress ought to have, by constitutional amendment, the 
power to subdivide them, "on the application of any considerable 
portion of a State containing not less than a hundred thousand 
persons." 8. " Li>bels, if levelled against anj' officer whatsoever of 
the United States, shall be cognizable in the courts of the United 
States : " " they ought not to be left to the cold and reluctant pro- 
tection of State courts." Finally: "But what avail laws which 
are not executed ? Renegade aliens conduct more than one-half of 
the most incendiary presses in the United States ; and yet, in open 
contempt and defiance of the laws, they are permitted to continue 
their destructive labors. Why are they not sent away ? Are laws 
of this kind passed merely to excite odium, and remain a dead letter? 
Vigor in the executive is at least as necessary as in the legislative 
branch : if the president requires to be stimulated, those who can 
approach him ought to do it." 

Here we have a complete apparatus of tyranny, such as a Jeffreys 
might have sketched for a Stuart. It justifies Jefferson's severest 
judgment concerning the spirit and tendency of this limited and 
unwise man ; and it calls to mind that sentence hurled at Demos- 
thenes by his rival in the presence of the people of Athens: "He 
who acts wickedly in private life cannot prove excellent in his pub- 
lic conduct." I do not know enough of the laws of our being to 



560 LIFE OF THOIMAS JEFFERSOlSr. 

explain the truth, but a truth it £<;,_that the paramour of a Rey- 
nolds was never yet capable of founding a safe system for the guid- 
ance of a nation. Immoral men may be gifted and amiable, but 
they are never wise. 

And now it fell to the lot of honest John Adams, by doing the 
noblest action of his life, to reduce Alexander Hamilton to some- 
thing like his natural proportions, while dispelling his silly dream 
of leading an American army to conquest in South America, and 
picking up a French island or two on the way. We all know Mr. 
Adams's boisterous foibles. But if all the other actions of his life 
had been foolish, this one act, now to be related, would entitle him 
to a high place among the worthies of America. 

Upon the return of Elbridge Gerry from France, October 1, 1798, 
he found himself, in the circles naturally frequented by a person of 
his character and services, the most odious of men. At Cambridge 
even his family had been subjected to outrage in his absence. 
Anonymous letters reached his young wife by " almost every post," 
attributing his prolonged stay in France to the cause of all others 
the most distressing to an honorable woman ; and " on several occa- 
sions," as his biographer adds, " the -morning sun shone upon a 
model of a guillotine, erected in the field before her window, 
smeared with blood, and having the effigy of a headless man." It 
was known that his house contained only women and children ; but 
savage yells, and bonfires suddenly blazing under their windows, 
disturbed and terrified them at night. After leaving his despatches 
with the cabinet at Philadelphia, and visiting his home, Mr. Gerry 
drove out to Quincy, where, most fortunately, the president was 
passing his vacation, — far from a cabinet devoted to Hamilton and 
determined upon war. In long conferences, renewed from day to 
day, Mr. Gerry proved, to the perfect satisfaction of Mr. Adams, that 
the government and people of France desired peace with the United 
States, and would respond cordially to a re-opening of diplomatic 
relations. He showed to the president letters from Talleyrand, 
offering him, in the name of the Directory, a public reception ; aban- 
doning the demand for a loan and an apology for the president's 
speech ; positively engaging to receive another American minister 
with all due respect ; and declaring a willingness to enter into just 
commercial arrangements on the basis of conceding to the United 
States the neutrality they claimed. Mr. Gerry had something 



HAIVULTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 561 

better to show the president than promises. At Havre, as he was 
about to sail, he had received a copy of an order of the Directory to 
the French officer in command of the West India fleet, to restrain 
the lawless spoliation of American commerce by French privateers. 
He told the president, too, that the French, dazzled and inflated 
beyond measure by Bonaparte's victories, had treated other nations 
with far greater insolence than they had the United States. The 
govei'nment had sent off from Paris thirteen foreign ambassadors, and 
even gone to the length of imprisoning one, and confining another to 
his house under guard. 

Mr. Adams, instructed and convinced by Mr. Gerry, had the great 
and rare courage to act upon his conviction. Against the opinion 
of his cabinet, contrary to the cry and expectation of his party, to 
the infinite disgust and cutting disappointment of Hamilton, as well 
as to his own speedy downfall and immortal glory, he re-opened dip- 
lomatic relations with France, which led to a peace that has lasted 
seventy-three years. It was his own act, and Elbridge Gerry alone 
shares with him the glory of it. Mr. Adams, in one of -his public 
letters of a later day, tells the story of Mr. Gerry's appointment and 
success in a few lines : " I called the heads of departments together, 
and proposed Mr. Gerry. All the five voices were unanimously 
against him. Such inveterate prejudice shocked me. I said noth- 
ing, but was determined not to be the slave of it. I knew the man 
infinitely better than all of them. He was nominated and approved, 
and finally saved the peace of the nation ; for he alone discovered 
and furnished the evidence that X, Y, and Z were employed by Tal- 
leyrand ; and he alone brought home the direct, formal, and official 
assurances upon which the subsequent commission proceeded, and 
peace was made." February 17, 1799, the president, to the equal , 
astonishment of Federalists and Republicans, nominated William/ 
Vans Murray plenipotentiar}' to the French Republic. ' 

Hamilton had a prompt revenge, but it inured to tlie good of the 
country. The strange manner iu which both the folly and the 
crimes of public men in the United States have issued in lasting 
public benefit, is an argument for Providence that sometimes stag- 
gers the stanchest unbelievejr. Hamilton destroyed the Federalists, / 
and Calhoun killed slavery. | When the time came for choosing can- 
didates for the presidenc}^, Hamilton was resolved to push John 
Adams from his seat, though in doing so he prostrated his own party. 
36 



562 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

"For my individual part," he wrote to Theodore Sedgwick, "my 
mind is made up. I will never more be responsible for Adams by 
my direct support, even though the consequence should be the elec- 
tion of Jefferson. If we must have an enemy at the head of the 
government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are 
not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his 
foolish and bad measures. Under Adams, as under Jefferson, the 
government will sink." 

A bungling business he made of it; but he had his way. His 
first thought was to lure General Washington from the retreat he so 
much loved, needed, and deserved ; but when the letter of Gouver- 
neur ]\rorris, proposing tliis ungrateful scheme, reached Mount Ver- 
non, Washington lay cold in death. Then Hamilton brought once 
more into play that baleful ingenuity of his which had misled him 
so often. He attempted a manoeuvre which every competent corpo- 
ral knows to be necessarily fatal, — a change of front under the 
enemy's hottest fire. First by secret manipulations of legislatures, 
and afterwards by an open, printed appeal, signed by his name, he 
endeavored to bring C. C. Pinckney, the Federalist candidate for the 
vice-presidency, into the presidency over Mr. Adams. By thus 
rending his own party in twain, he made the victory easier to the 
Republicans ; and perhaps it was he who made that victory theirs in 
1800 instead of 1804 

Nor can we award him even the credit of submitting to the decis- 
ion of the people, which is one of the two vital conditions of a 
republic's existence ; the other being a pure ballot-box. The election 
in New York went against him; i.e. the people elected a legislature 
pledged to choose Republican electors. He instantly wrote to Gov- 
ernor Jay, urging him to summon at once the existincf legishituve 
(whose time had still seven weeks to run), and get it to pass a law 
\depriving the legislature of the power to elect electors, and devolv- 
ing it upon the people by districts. This manoeuvre would 
give the beaten Federalists a second chance. It would rob the Re- 
publicans of their victory. It would compel them to gird on their 
armor again, and descend a second time into the arena. It was los- 
ing the game, grabbing the stakes, and demanding another chance 
to- win them, with points in favor of the grabber. 

To a person unacquainted with Hamilton's peculiar character, this 
advice to the governor seems simply base. But the error, like mil- 



HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 563 

lions of other errors of our short-siglited race, was not half so much 
moral as mental. It was ignorance and incapacity rather than tur- 
pitude. He said to tlie governor, in substance : I own that this 
measure is not regular, nor delicate, nor, in ordinary circumstances, 
even decent; but "scruples of delicacy and propriety ought not to 
hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an 
atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession 
of the helm of state." You don't know these Republicans as I do, 
he continued. The party is '' a composition, indeed, of very incon- 
gruous materials, but all tending to mischief; some of them to the 
overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies ; 
others of them to a revolution, after the manner of Bonaparte. I 
speak from indubitable facts, not from conjectures and inferences." 
Now, my dear sir, these people call to their aid " all the resources 
which vice can give : " can we, then, hope to succeed, we virtuous, if 
we confine ourselves " within all the ordinary forms of delicacy and 
decorum?" No, indeed. But, of course, we must "franldy avow" 
our object. You must tell the legislature that our purpose is to 
reverse the result of the late election, in order to prevent the general 
government from falling into hostile hands, and to save the '* great 
cause of social order." To us, this long epistle to Mr. Jay reads 
more like mania than wickedness. This man had lived in New York 
twenty years without so much as learning the impossibility of its 
people being made to submit to an avowed outrage so gross ! Gov- 
ernor Jay was at no loss to characterize the proposal aright. Instead 
of plunging the State into civil war by adopting the measure, he 
folded Hamilton's letter, and put it away among his most private 
papers, bearing this indorsement : " Proposing a measure for party 
purposes ivhich I think it would not become vie to adoptP 

Mr. Jefferson's attitude during this intensest of all known polit- 
ical struggles is an interesting study. The simplicity of his politi- 
cal sj^stem was such, that he could give a complete statement of it 
in a few lines ; and it was so sound, that the general government, 
from 1789 to 1873, has worked well so far as it has conformed to it, 
and worked ill as often as it has departed from it. Jefferson was so 
RIGHT, that every honest, patriotic man who has since gone to Wash- 
ington after having learned his rudiments from Jefferson, and has 
had strength enough to vote up to the height of his convictions, has 
made a respectable public career, no matter how ordinary his endow- 



J 



564 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 

ments ; while every public man who has not accepted tliis simple 
clew to the labyrinth of public business has made a career which 
time and events will condemn, though he may have had the talents 
of a Webster or a Clay. 

This is the Jeflfersonian system in brief: *'Let the general gov- 
ernment be reduced to foreign concerns onlj'', and let our affairs be 
disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, 
which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left 
free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be 
reduced to a very simple organization, and a very unexpensive one; 
a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants." 

This was the basis. He explained himself more in detail to 
Elbridge Gerry, in January, 1799. He said he was in fixvor of 
fulfilling the Constitution in the sense in which it was originallj'' 
interpreted by the men who drew it, and as it was accepted by the 
States upon their interpretation. He objected to every thing which 
tended to monarchy, or which even gave the government a mon- 
archical air and tone. He claimed for the States every power not 
expresshj yielded by the Constitution to the general government. 
He demanded that the three great departments of the government, 
Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary, should each keep to its 
sphere, neither of them encroaching upon any of the others. He 
desired a government rigorously frugal and simple, and the applica- 
tion of all possible savings to the discharge of the public debt. In 
peace, no standing army, and only just navy enough to protect our 
coasts and harbors from ravage and depredation. Free-trade with 
all nations; political connection with none; little or no diplomatic 
establishment. Freedom of religion ; perfect equality of sects 
before the law; freedom of the press ; free criticism of government 
by everybody, whether just or unjust. Finally, in the great struggle 
which began with the dawn of human reason, and will end only 
when reason is supreme in human affairs, namely, the struggle 
between Science and Superstition, he was on the side of Science. 
Personally, he was in favor of " encouraging the progress of science 
in all its branches ; " and he was opposed to "overawing the human 
mind \>^ stories of raw-head and bloody bones," which made it dis- 
trustful of itself, and disposed to follow blindly the lead of others. 
The first object of his heart, he said, was his own country, — not 
Trance, not England, — and the one no more than the other, except 



HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 565 

as one might be more or less frieuflly to us than the other. The 
depredations of France upon our commerce were indeed " atrocious," 
but he believed that a mission sincerely disposed to peace would 
obtain retribution and honorable settlement. These were his 
principles, but he indulged no antipathy to those who differed from 
him. ''I know too well," said he, "the texture of the human mind 
and the slipperiness of the human reason, to consider differences of 
opinion otherwise than differences of form and feature. Integrity 
of views, more tlian their soundness, is the basis of esteem." 

Such is a brief outline of his opinions, political and other, in view 
of the fact well known, that he would again be the candidate of 
his party for the presidency in 1800. 

The tranquil dignity of the candidate's demeanor was pleasing to 
witness. During 1798 and 1799 he devoted a great part of his 
time and strength to enlightening the public mind; emplojang for 
this purpose all that his party possessed of bright intelligence and 
practised ability. But when, in 1800, the contest lost the character 
of a conflict of ideas, and assumed that of a competition of persons, 
he ceased to write letters, withdrew to Monticello, and spent an 
unusually laborious summer in improving his nail-factory, burning 
bricks for his house, and superintending his farms ; rarely going 
farther from home than the next village ; never too busy to keep up 
his meteorological records, and look after the interests of the Philo- 
sophical Society. 

Indeed, if we may judge from his letters, the more furiously the 
storm of politics raged about him, the more attentive he was to 
philosophy. It was in the very heat of the war frenzy of 1798 that 
he wrote his well-known letter to Mr. Nolan, asking information 
concerning those "large herds of horses in a wild state," which, he 
had been recently informed, were roaming "in the country west of 
the Mississippi." He entreated Mr. Nolan to be very particular 
and exact in detailing "the manners, habits, and laws of the horse's 
existence " in a state of nature. It was also during the very crisis 
of the French imbroglio, in February, 1799, that he penned his 
curious letter about the steam-engine ; in which he expressed a 
timid hope, that perhaps the steam-engine, as now improved by 
Watt, might be available for pumping water to the tops of houses 
for family use. Every family, he said, has a kitchen fire; small, 
indeed, but sufficient for the purpose. To these years seems to 



566 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

belong also his invention of the revolving chair, which the newspa- 
pers of that day nsed to style " Mr, Jefferson's whirligig chair," 
now a familiar object in all countries and most counting-rooms. 
The party papers of the time had their little joke even upon this 
innocent device ; insisting that Mr. Jefferson invented it to facilitate 
his looking all ways at once. 



CHAPTER LIX. 

THE CAMPAIGN" LIES OF 1800. 

That product of the human intellect which we denominate the 
Campaign Lie, though it did not originate in the United States, has 
here attained a development unknown in other lands. It is the 
destiny of America to try all experiments and exhaust all follies. 
In the short space of seventy-seven years, we have exhausted the 
efficiency of falsehood uttered to keep a man out of office. The fact 
is not to our credit, indeed ; for we must have lied to an immeasura- 
ble extent before the printed word of man, during six whole months 
of every fourth year, could have lost so much of its natural power 
to affect human belief Still less is it for our good; since Campaign 
Truths, however important they may be, are equally ineffectual. 
Soon after the publication of a certain ponderous work, called the 
Life of Andrew Jackson, one of the original Jackson men of Penn- 
sylvania met the author in the street, and said in substance, " I am 
astonished to find how little I knew of a man whose battles I fought 
for twelve years. I heard all those stories of his quarrels and vio- 
lence ; but I supposed, of cofrse, they were Campaign Lies ! " 

Thomas Jefferson, who began so many things in the early career 
of the United States, was the first object upon whom the Campaign 
Liar tried his unpractised talents. The art, indeed, may be said to 
have been introduced in 179G to prevent his election to the presi- 
dency ; but it was in 1800 that it was clearly developed into a 
distinct species of falsehood. And it must be confessed, that, even 
amid the heat of the election of 1800, the 'Campaign Liar was hard 
put to it, and did not succeed in originating that variety and reck- 
less extravagance of calumny which has crowned his efforts since. 
Jefferson's life presented to his view a most discouraging monotony 
of innocent and beneficial actions, — twenty-five years of laborious 

567 



568 LITE OF THOIklAS JEFFEESON. 

and unrecompensed public service, relieved by the violin, science, 
invention, agriculture, tbe education of his nephews, and the love of 
liis daughters. A life so exceptionally blameless did not give fair 
scope to talent; since a falsehood, to have its full and lasting effect, 
must contain a fraction of a grain of truth. Still, the Campaign 
Liar of 1800 did very well for a beginner. 

He was able, of course, to prove that Mr. Jefferson "hated the 
Constitution," had hated it from the beginning, and was "pledged 
to subvert it." The noble Marcellus of New York (Hamilton 
apparently) writing in Noah Webster's new paper, the Commercial 
Advertiser, soared into propliecy, and was thus enabled to describe 
■with precision the methods which Mr. Jefferson would employ in 
effecting his fell purpose. He would begin by turning every Fed- 
eralist out of office, down to the remotest postmaster. Then he 
would "tumble the financial system of the country into ruin at one 
stroke;" wliich would of necessity stop all payments of interest on 
the public debt, and bring on "universal bankruptcy and beggary." 
Next he would dismantle the navy, and thus give such free course 
to privateering, that "every vessel which floated from our shores 
would be plundered or captured." And, since every source of reve- 
nue would be dried up, the government would no longer be able to 
j)ay the pensions of the scarred veterans of the Revolution, who 
would be seen " starving in the streets, or living on the cold and 
precarious supplies of charity." Soon the unpaid officers of the 
government would resign, and " counterfeiting would be practised 
with impunity." In short, good people, the election of Jefferson 
will be the signal for Pandora to open her box, and empty it upon 
your heads. '^ 

The Campaign Liar mounted the pulpit. In the guise of the 
Reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Connecticut, he stated that Mr. 
Jefferson had gained his estate by robbery and fraud, — yea, even by 
robbing a widow and fatherless children of ten thousand pounds, 
intrusted to him by the dead father's will. " All of this can be 
proved," said the Reverend Campaigner. Some of the falsehoods 
were curiously remote from the truth. "He despises mechanics," 
said a Philadelphia paragraphist of a man who doted on a well- 
skilled, conscientious workman. "He despises mechanics, and owns 
two hundred and fifty of them," remarked this writer. That Mon- 
ticello swarmed with yellow Jeffersons was the natural conjecture 



THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 569 

of a party who recognized as their chief the paramour of a Reynolds. 
" Mr. Jefferson's Congo Harem " was a party cry. There were 
allusions to a certain " Dusky Sally," otherwise Sally Henings, 
whose children were said to resemble the master of Monticello in 
their features and the color of their hair. In this particular Cam- 
paign Lie, there was just that fractional portion of truth which was 
necessary to preserve it fresh and vigorous to this day. There is 
even a respectable Madison Henings, now living in Ohio, who sup- 
poses that Thomas Jefferson was his father. Mr. Henings has been 
misinformed. The record of Mr. Jefferson's every day and hour, 
contained in his pocket memorandum books, compared with the 
record of his slaves' birth, proves the impossibility of his having 
been the father of Madison Henings. So I am informed by Mr. 
Randall, who examined the records in the possession of the family. 
The father of those children was a near relation of the Jeff'ersons, 
who need not be named. 

Perhaps I may, in view of recent and threatened publications, 
copy a few words from Mr. Randall's interesting letter on this sub- 
ject. They will be valued by those who believe that chastity in man 
is as precious a treasure as chastity in woman, and not less essential 
to the happiness, independence, and dignity of his existence : — 

" Colonel Randolph (grandson of Mr. Jefferson) informed me (at 
Monticello) that there was not a shadow of suspicion that Mr. Jef- 
ferson, in this or any other instance, had any such intimacy wdth 
his female slaves. At the period when these children were bom, 
Colonel Randolph had charge of Monticello. He gave all the gene- 
ral directions, and gave out all ffieir clothes to the slaves. He said 
Sally Henings was treated and dressed just like the rest. He said 
Mr. Jefferson never locked the door of his room by day, and that he, 
Colonel Randolph, slept within sound of his breathing at night. 
He said he had never seen a motion or a look or a circumstance 
which led him to suspect, for an instant, that there was a particle 
more of familiarity between Mr. Jeff"erson and Sally Henings than 
between him and the most repulsive servant in the establishment, 
and that no person living at Monticello ever dreamed of such a 
thing. Colonel Randolph said that he had spent a good share of 
his life closely about Mr. Jeff'erson, — at home and on his journeys, 
in all sorts of circumstances, — and he believed him to be as chaste 



570 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

and pure, "as immaculate a man as ever God created." Mr. Jeffer- 
son's eldest daughter, Mrs. Governor Randolph, took the Dusky 
Sally stories much to heart. But she spoke to her sons only once 
on the subject. Not long before her death, she called two of them 
to her, — the Colonel, and George Wythe Randolph. She asked 
the Colonel if he remembered when Henings (the slave who most 
resembled Mr. Jefferson) was born. He turned to the book contain- 
ing the list of slaves, and found that he was born at the time sup- 
posed by Mrs. Randolph. She then directed her son's attention to 
the fact, that Mr. Jefferson and Sally Heniugs could not have met, 
were far distant from each other, for fifteen months prior to the 
birth. She bade her sons remember this fact, and always defend 
the character of their grandfather. It so happened, when I was 
examining an old account-book of Mr. Jefferson's, I came po/? on 
the original entry of this slave's birth ; and I was then able, from 
' well-known circumstances, to prove the fifteen months' separation. 
... I could give fifty more facts, if there were any need of it, to 
show Mr. Jefferson's innocence of this and all similar offences 
against propriety." 

So much for this poor Campaign Lie, which has been current in 
the world for seventy-four years, and will, doubtless, walk the earth 
as long as weak mortals need high examples of folly to keep them on 
endurable terms with themselves. 

Religion, for the first and last time, was an important element in 
the political strife of 1800. There was not a pin to choose between 
the heterodoxy of the two candidates ; and, indeed, Mr. Adams was 
sometimes, in his familiar letters, more pronounced in his dissent 
from established beliefs than Jefferson. Neither of these Christians 
perceived, as clearly as w^e now do, the absolute necessity to unrea- 
soning men of that husk of fiction in which vital truth is usually 
enclosed ; nor what a vast, indispensable service the Priest renders the 
ignorant man in supplying fictions for his acceptance le.ss degrading 
than those which he could invent for himself Mr. Adams, however, 
was by far the more impatient of the two with popular creeds, as he 
shows in many a comic outburst of robust and boisterous contempt. 
He protested his utter inability to comprehend that side of human 
nature which made people object to paj'ing a pittance for his new 
navy-yards, and eager to throw away their money upon such struc- 



THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 571 

tures as St. Paul's in London and St. Peter's at Rome. As for the 
doctrine of the Trinity, he greatly surpassed Jefferson in his aver- 
sion to it. He scolded Jefferson for bringing over European -profes- 
sors, because they were " all infected with Episcopal and Presbyterian 
creeds," and "all believed that that great Principle which has pro- 
duced this boundless universe, — Newton's universe and Herschel's 
universe, — came down to this little ball, to be spit upoij by Jews." 
Mr. Adams's opinion was, that " until this awful blasphemy was got 
rid of, there will never be any liberal science in this world." 

And yet he escaped anathema. Mr. Jefferson, on the contrary, 
was denounced by the pious and moral Hamilton as " an atheist." 
The great preacher of that day in New York was Dr. John Mason, 
an ardent politician, as patriotic and well-intentioned a gentleman 
as then lived. He evolved from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia the 
appalling truth, that the Republican candidate for the presidency 
did not believe in a universal deluge ! He sounded the alarm. A 
few weeks before the election, he published a pamphlet entitled The 
Voice of Warning to Christians on tbe ensuing Election ; in which 
he reviewed the Notes, and inferred, from passages quoted, that the 
author was "a profane philosopher and an infidel." "Christians !" 
he exclaimed, " it is thus that a man, whom you are expected to 
elevate to the chief magistracy, insults yourselves and your Bible !" 
An interesting character was this Dr. Mason, if we may believe the 
anecdotes still told of him by old inhabitants of Now York. What 
a scene must that have been when he paused, in the midst of one of 
his rousing Fast-day sermons, and, raising his eyes and hands to 
heaven, burst into impassioned supplication : " Send us, if Thou 
wilt, murrain upon our cattle, a famine upon our land, cleanness of 
teeth in our borders ; send us pestilence to waste our cities ; send us, 
if it please Thee, the sword to bathe itself in the blood of our sons ; 
but spare us. Lord God Most Merciful, spare us that curse, — most 
dreadful of all curses, — an alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte ! " 
An eye-witness reports that, as the preacher uttered these words 
with all the energy of frantic apprehension, the blood gushed from 
his nostrils. He put his handkerchief to his face, without knowing 
what he did, and, instantly resuming his gesture, held the bloody 
handkerchief aloft, as if it were the symbol of the horrors he foretold. 
To. such a point, in those simple old days, could campaign falsehood 
madden able and good men ! 



1 



672 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

The orthodox clergy were not averse then, it appears, to "politics 
in the pulpit." Our historical collections yield many proofs of it in 
the form of pamphlets and sermons of the year 1800. It cheers the 
mind of the inquirer, in his dusty rummaging, to measure the stride 
the public mind has taken in less than three-quarters of a century. 
"Hold ! " cries one vigorous lay sermonizer (Claims of Thomas Jef- 
ferson to the Presidency examined at the Bar of Christianity), — 
"hold! The blameless deportment of this man has been the theme 
of encomium. He is chaste, temperate, hospitable, affectionate, and 
frank." But he is no Christian ! He does not believe in the Del- 
uge. He does not go to church. "Shall Thomas Jefferson," asks 
this writer, " who denies the truth of Christianity, and avows the 
pernicious folly of all religion, be your governor ? " 

One writer proves his case thus : 1, The French Revolution was 
a conspiracy to overthrow the Cliristian religion ; 2, Thomas Jeffer- 
son avowed a cordial sympathy with the French Revolution ; 
3, Therefore Thomas Jefferson aims at the destruction of the Chris- 
tian religion. To this reasoning facts were added. Mr. Jefferson, 
fearing to trust the post-office, had written a letter in Latin to an 
infidel author, approving his work, and urging him to print it. Then 
look at his friends ! Are they not " deists, atheists, and infidels ? " 
Did not General Dearborn, one of his active supporters, while travel- 
ling to Washington in a public stage, say, that " so long as our 
temples stood, we could not hope for good order or good govern- 
ment " ? The same Dearborn, passing a church in Connecticut, 
pointed at it, and scornfully exclaimed, "Look at that painted nuis- 
ance ! " But the most popular and 9ften-repeated anecdote of this 
nature, which tlie contest elicited, was the following: "When the 
late Rev. Dr. John B. Smith resided in Virginia, the famous Mazzei 
happened one night to be his guest. Dr. Smith having, as usual, 
assembled bis family for their evening devotions, the circumstance 
occasioned some discourse on religion, in which the Italian made no 
secret of his infidel principles. In the course of conversation, he 
remarked to Dr. Smith, * Why, your great philosopher and statesman, 
Mr. Jefferson, is rather further gone in infidelity than I am ; ' and 
related, in confirmation, the following anecdote. That, as he was 
once riding with Mr. Jefferson, he expressed his ' surprise that the 
people of this country take no better care of their public buildings.' 
' What buildings ? ' exclaimed Mr. Jefferson. ' Is that not a 



THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 573 

churcli ?' replied he, pointing to a decayed edifice. 'Yes,' answered 
Mr. Jefferson. 'I am astonished,' said the other, 'that they permit 
it to be in so ruinous a condition.' 'It is good eJiour/h,' rejoined 
Mr. Jefferson, 'for him that was horn in a manger T Such a con- 
temptuous fling at the blessed Jesus could issue from the lips of no 
other than a deadly foe to his name and his cause." 

This story had the greater effect from the constant repetition of 
the unlucky passage of Jefferson's letter to Mazzei upon the Sam- 
sons and Solomons who had gone over to the English side of Amer- 
ican politics. Fifty versions of it could easily be collected, even at 
this late day, but the one just given appears to be the original. It is 
startling to discover, while turning over the campaign litter of 1800, 
that, in the height and hurly-burly of the strife, there was spread 
abroad, all over the land, a report of Mr. Jefferson's sudden death, 
which it required several days to correct, even in the Atlantic cities. 

It was first printed in the Baltimore American. " I discharge my 
duty," said the gentleman who brought the news from Virginia, " in 
giving til is information as I received it ; but may the God who 
directed the pen and inspired the heart of the author of the Declara- 
tion of American Independence procrastinate, if but for a short time, 
so severe a punishment from a land which heretofore has received 
more than a common share of his blessings ! " 

It is not clear, upon the first view of the subject, why Jefferson 
should have been singled out for reprobation on account of a hetero- 
doxy in which so many of the great among his compeers shared. 
He attributed it himself to the conspicuous part he had talcen in 
the separation of Church and State in Virginia; a policy which the 
clerg}' opposed with vehemence in each State, vintil, in 1834, the 
divorce was complete and universal by the act of Massachusetts. 
Readers of Dr. Lyman Beecher's Autobiography remember how ear- 
nestly that genial hunter before the Lord fought the severance in Con- 
necticut. Some of the clergy, Jefferson thought, cherished hopes of 
undoing the work done in Virginia and other States through Madi- 
son, Wythe, and himself. But, said he, "the returning good sense 
of oxir country threatens abortion to their hopes, and they believe 
that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposi- 
tion to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn 
upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny 
over the mind of man." 



574 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

He avoided, on principle, that line of conduct, so familiar to pub- 
lic men of the fourth, fifth, and sixth rank, which Mark Twain has 
recently called *' currying favor with the religious element," While 
he was most careful not to utter a word, in the hearing of young or 
unformed persons, even in his own family, calculated to disturb their 
faith, he was equally strenuous in maintaining his right to liberty 
both of thought and utterance." Thus, at a time when the word 
"Unitarian" was only less opprobrious than infidel, and he was a 
candidate for the presidency, he went to a church of that denomina- 
tion at Philadelphia, in which, as he says, " Dr. Priestley ofiiciated 
to numerous audiences." " I never will," he once wrote, " by any 
word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of 
inquiry into the religious opinions of others. On the contrary, we 
are bound, you, I, and every one, to make common cause, even with 
error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience. 
We ought, with one heart and one hand, to hew down the daring 
and dangerous efforts of those who would seduce the public opinion 
to substitute itself into that tyranny over religious faith which the 
laws have so justly abdicated. For this reason, were my opinions 
up to the standard of those who arrogate the right of questioning 
them, I would not countenance that arrogance by descending to an 
explanation." • 

It strengthened Jeff'erson's faith in republican institutions, that 
his countrymen rose superior to religious prejudices in 1800, and 
gave their votes very nearly as they would if th« religious question 
had not been raised. Tradition reports, that, when the news of his 
election reached New England, some old ladies, in wild consternation, 
hung their Bibles down the well in the butter-cooler. But, in truth, 
the creed of Jefferson is, and long has been, the real creed of the 
people of the United States. They know in their hearts, whatever 
form of words they may habitually use, that Christianity is a life, 
not a belief; a principal of conduct, not a theory of the universe. 
" I am a Christian," wrote Jefferson, " in the only sense in which 
Jesus wished any one to be, — sincerely attached to his doctrines in 
preference to all others." One evening, in Washington, having, 
for a wonder, a little leisure, he took two cheap copies of the New 
Testament, procured for the purpose, and cut from them the words of 
Jesus, and such other passages of the evangelists as are in closest 
accord with them. These he pasted in a little book, and entitled it, 



THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 575 

Tlie Philosophy of Jesus extracted from the Text of the Evangelists. 
Two evenings were employed in this interesting work; aud when it 
was done he contemplated it with rapturous satisfaction. The 
words of Jesus, he thought, were " as distinguishable from the mat- 
ter in which they are imbedded as diamonds in dunghills. A more 
precious morsel of ethics was never seen." 



CHAPTER LX. 

THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND BURB. 

The peculiar result of the election of 1800 is familiar to most 
.readers : Jefferson, 73 ; Burr, 73 ; Adams, 65 ; C. C. Pinckney, 64 ; 
/ Jay, 1. Again Hamilton's preposterous device of the electoral col- 
lege brought trouble and peril upon tlie country; for the Federalists, 
as soon as the tie was known, made haste to fill up the measure of 
their errors by intriguing to defeat the will of the people, and make 
Burr president instead of Jefferson. I need not repeat the shame- 
■^ul storj'. For many days, during which the House of Representa- 
tives balloted twentj'-nine times, the country was excited and 
alarmed; and nothing averted civil commotion but the wise and 
resolute conduct of the Republican candidates. At Albany, where 
Burr's duties as a member of the legislature of New York detained 
him during the ci'isis, an affair more interesting to him even than the 
presidential election was transpiring. Theodosia, his only daugh- 
ter, the idol of his life,*was married at Albany, February 2, 180^ / 
(a week before the balloting began), to Joseph Alston of South 
Carolina. He performed but one act in connection with the strug- 
gle in the wilderness of Washington. He wrote a short, decisive 
note to a member of the House, repudiating the unworthj' attempt 
about to be made to elevate him. His friends, he truly said, 
" would dishonor his views and insult his feelings by a suspicion 
that he would submit to be instrumental in counteracting the wishes 
and the expectations of the United States;" and he constituted the 
friend to whom he wrote his proxy to declare these sentiments if the 
occasion should require. Having despatched this letter, and being 
then at a distance of ten * days' travel from the seat of government, 
he did nothing, and could do nothing, further. 

* " New York and Albany Mail Stage — 

" Leaves New York every morning at six o'clock, loflgea flt Peekekill and Rhinetieck, 
and arrives in Albany on the third day. Fare of each passenger through, eight dollars; and 
676 



THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND BUER. 577 

Jefferson's part was mncli more difficnlfc. Besides that a great 
party looked' to him as the repository of their riglits, his own pride 
was interested in his not being made the victim of a corriapt 
intrigue. As the jiresident of the Senate, he was in the nearest 
proximity to the scene of strife, liable to take fire from the passions 
that raged there. Seldom has a fallible man been placed in circum- 
stances more trying to mind and nerve. 

There were four evil courses possible to the Federalists ; each of 
which Jefferson had considered, and was prepared for, before the 
balloting began, 

1. They might elect Aaron Burr president, and himself vice-pres- 
ident. In that case, because the election would have been " agree- 
able to the Constitution," though " variant from the intentions of 
the people," his purpose was to submit without a word. " No man," 
he wrote a few weeks later, " would have submitted more cheerfully 
than myself, because I am sure the administration would have been 
Republican." 

2. The Federalists could offer terms to JefiFerson, and endeavor to 
extort valuable concessions from him. Upon this point, too, his 
mind was made up; and he met every approach of this nature by a 
declaration, in some form, that " he would not come into the presi- 
dency by capitulation." He has him"self recorded several of these 
attempts at negotiation. " Coming out of the Senate one day," he 
writes, " I found Gouverneur Morris on the steps. He stopped me, 
and began a conversation on the atrange and portentous state of 
things then existing, and went on to observe, that the reasons why 
the minority of States was so opposed to my being elected were, that 
they apprehended, that, 1, I would turn all Federalists out of office ; 
2, Put down the navy; 3, Wipe off the public debt. That I need 
onl^' to declare, or authorize my friends to declare, that I would not 
take these steps, and instantly the event of the election would be 

Bixpence per mile way passengers. For seats apply to William Vandervoort, No. 48, corner 
of Courtland and Greenwich Streets, New York, and of T. Wetmore, Albany." — New York 
Evening Post, Sept. 11, 1804. 

" The New York and Albany Mail Stage on the West Side of the Kiver — 

" Will leave New York every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, at two o'clock in the 

afternoon, lodges at Hackensack, Goshen, and Kingston, and arrives at Albany the third day. 

Fare of each passenger through, eight dollars. Way passengers, ^re cents per mile. For 

Beats apply to John Oakley, No. 75 Vesey Street, opposite the Bear Market, New York. 
" Extra carriages and horses may be had at any time by applying at Hoboken or Hacken- 

Back." — Neio York Evening I'ost, Nov. 6, 1804. 
37 



578 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

fixed. I told him that I should leave the world to jvulge of the 
course I meant to pursue by that which I had j)ursued hitherto, 
believing it to be my duty to be passive and silent during the present 
scene ; that I should certainly make no terms ; should never go into 
the office of president by capitulation, nor with my hands tied by any 
conditions which should hinder me from pursuing the measures which 
I should deem for the public good." Other interviewers, some of 
whom held the election in their hands, had no better success. 

3. The balloting could have been continued day after day, until 
the end of Mr. Adams's term, two weeks distant^ when, there being 
no president and no vice-president, anarchy and chaos might have 
been expected. For this emergency, also, Jefferson had provided a 
plan, which, he always thought, would have prevented serious 
trouble. The Republican members of Congress, in conjunction with 
the jjresident and vice-president elect, intended to meet, and issue a 
call to the whole country for a convention to revise the Constitution, 
and provide a suitable, orderly remedy for the lapse of government. 
This convention, as Jeiferson remarked to Dr. Priestley, "would 
have been on the ground in eight weeks, would have repaired the 
Constitution where it was defective, and wound it up again." 

4. But unhappily there was a fourth expedient contemplated, 
which was frauglit with peril to the country's peace. It was pro- 
posed to pass a law devolving the government upon the chairman 
of the Senate (to be elected by the Senate), in case the office of 
president should become vacant. At once he declared, in conversa- 
tions meant to be reported, that such an attempt would be resisted 
by force. The very day, said he, that such an act is passed, the 
Middle States (i.e. Virginia and Pennsylvania) will arm. And 
when we know that James Monroe was the governor of Virginia, 
and Thomas McKean governor of Pennsjdvania, we may be sure 
that this was no empty threat. Not for a day, he added, will such 
a usurpation be submitted to. "I was decidedly with those," he 
explained a few weeks after, "who were determined not to permit 
it. Because, that precedent once set, it would be artificially repro- 
duced, and would soon end in a dictator." 

But he was not wanting in efforts to prevent a calamity so dire. 
There was one man who could have instantly frustrated the scheme 
by his veto, — Mr. Adams, the president, with whom Jefferson, 
with that indomitable good-nature and inexhaustible tolerance of 



THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND BURR. 579 

his, had maintained friendly relations through all the mad strife 
of the last years. Upon reaching the seat of government at the 
beginning of this session, he had hesitated before calling at the 
presidential mansion. Knowing the sensitive self-love of his old 
friend, he was afraid that if he called too soon Mr. Adams would 
think he meant to exult over him, and that if he delayed his visit 
beyond the usual period it would be regarded as a slight. He 
called, however, at length, and found the defeated man alQne. One 
glance at the president satisfied him that he had come too soon. 
Mr. Adams, evidently unreconciled to the issue of the election, hur- 
ried forward in a manner which betrayed extreme agitation ; and, 
without sitting down or asking his visitor to sit, said, in a tremulous 
voice, "You have turned me out; you have turned me out." Mr. 
Jefferson, in that suave and gentle tone which fell like balm upon 
the sore and troubled minds of men, said, " I have not turned you 
out, Mr. Adams ; and I am glad to avail myself of this occasion to 
show that I have not, and to explain my views on this subject. In. 
consequence of a division of opinion existing among our fellow-citi- 
zens, as to the proper constitution of our political institutions, and of 
the wisdom and propriety of certain measures which have been 
adopted by our government, that portion of our citizens who ap- 
proved and advocated one class of these opinions and measures 
selected jon as their candidate for the presidency, and their oppo- 
nents selected me. If you or myself had not been in existence, or 
for any other cause had not been selected, other persons would have 
been selected in our places ; and thus the contest would have been 
carried on, and with the same result, except that the party which 
supported you would have been defeated by a greater majority, as it 
was known, that, but for you, your party would have carried their 
unpopular measures much farther than they did. You will see from 
this that the late contest was not one of a personal character between 
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but between the advocates and 
opponents of certain political opinions and measures, and, therefore, 
should produce no unkind feelings between the two men who hap- 
pened to be placed at the head of the two parties." 

These words did much to restore Mr. Adams to composure for 
the moment. Both gentlemen took seats, when they conversed in 
their usual friendly way upon the topics of the hour. We have the 
testimony of both of them to the correctness of this report. Mr. 



580 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

Jeflferson has recorded the interview; and once, when his friend, 
Edward Coles, repeated to Mr. Adams the story as he had heard 
it at Monticello, Mr. Adams said to him, " If you had been present 
and witnessed the scene 3'ou could not have given a more accurate 
account of what passed." The fiery ex-president added, " Mr. 
Jefferson said I was sensitive, did he? Well, I tvas sensitive. 
But I never before heard that Mr. Jefferson had given a second 
thought as to the proper time for making the visit." 

Being thus on the old terms with his old friend, Jefferson visited 
him at this threatening crisis to call his attention to the most 
obvious means of averting the danger. He has recorded the failure 
of his attempt: "We conversed on the state of things. I observed 
to him that a very dangerous experiment was then in contemplation, 
to defeat' the presidential election hj an act of Congress declaring 
the right of the Senate to name a president of the Senate, to devolve 
on him the government during any interregnum ; that such a 
measure would probably produce resistance by force, and incalculable 
consequences, which it would be in his power to prevent by negativ- 
ing such an act. He seemed to think such an act justifiable, and 
observed, it was in my power to fix the election by a word in an 
instant, by declaring I would not turn out the Federal officers, nor 
put down the navy, nor sponge out the national debt. Finding his 
mind made up as to the usurpation of the government by the 
president of the Senate, I urged it no further, and observed, the 
world must judge as to mj'self of the future by the past, and turned 
the conversation to something else." 

Happily the Federalists, admonished by their fears, recovered in 
time the use of their reason. Hamilton, from the first, opposed the 
attempt to give the first place to his vigilant New York rival; but 
this he did merely on the ground that Burr was, if possible, a more 
terrific being even than Jefferson. Gouverueur Morris, who was a 
gentleman, as well as a man of real ability, placed his own opposi- 
tion to the nefarious scheme on the right basis : " Since it was 
evidently the intention of our fellow-citizens to make Mr. Jefferson 
their president, it seems proper to fulfil that intention." After 
seven days of balloting, the House of Representatives elected 
Thomas Jefferson president, and Aaron Burr vice-president. 

Thus ended the rule of the Federalists, the first party that ever 
governed the United States. Never was the downfall of a party 



THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSQN AND BUKE. 581 

more just or more necessary. Its entire policy was tainted by the 
unbelief pf its leaders in the central principle of the Republican 
system. Nearly every important thing they did was either wrong 
in itself, or done for a wrong reason. The only president they ever 
elected, Mr. Adams, was as interesting and picturesque a character 
as Dr. Samuel Johnson, and nearly as unfit as Johnson for an 
executive post ; while Hamilton, in whom they put their chief trust, 
can be acquitted of depravity only by conceding his ignorance and 
incapacity. Alexander Hamilton had no message for the people of 
the United States. His " mission," if he had one, was not here. 
His mind was not continental. He did not know his ground. And 
like many other unwise, well-intentioned men, he brought oppro- 
brium even upon that portion of truth which he had been able to 
grasp. Probably there is an ingredient of truth in every heartfelt 
conviction of an honest mind ; and no one can read Hamilton's con- 
fidential letters without feeling his sincerity and devotion. 

The basis of truth in the convictions of Hamilton and his circle 
was, that the Intelligence and Virtue of a country must, in some 
way, be got to the top of things, and govern. Jefferson heartily 
agreed with them in this opinion ; and felt it the more deeply, from 
having discovered that the political sj'stem of the Old World had 
placed a fool on every throne, and hedged him about with a dissolute 
and ignorant class. Hamilton always assumed that intelligence 
and virtue of the requisite degree are only to be found among peo- 
ple who possess a certain amount of property; equivalent, say, to a 
thousand Spanish dollars. Jefferson was for bringing the wltole of 
the intelligence and virtue of a community into play by the subsoil 
plough of general suff"rags ; recognizing the natural right of every 
mature person to a voice in the government of his country. If 
Hamilton *had been a wise and able man, he would have had an im- 
portant part to play in anticipating and warding off the only real 
danger that has ever menaced republican institutions in America, — 
ignorant suff'rage. Upon him would have devolved the congenial 
task of convincing the American people, seventy years before Tweed 
and the Carpet-bagger convinced them, that a man of this age who 
cannot read is not a mature person, but is a child, who cannot per- 
form the act of the mind called voting. { His had been the task of 
establishing the truth, that a system of suff'rage which admits the 
most benighted men, and excludes the most enlightened women, is 



682. LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

one which will not conduct this republic honorably or safely down 
the centuries. '. He might have helped us in this direction. His 
"thousand Spanish dollars" belonged to another system, utterly 
unsuited to this hemisphere ; and he did nothing for the United 
States which time has not undone, or is not about to undo. 

He threatened, it seems, to " beat down," the incoming adminis- 
tration ; and, indeed, I observe, in the newspapers of the time, that 
he continued, as long as he lived, to fulminate sonorous inanity 
against Mr. Jefferson's acts and utterances. But he was never again 
a power in the politics of America. He bought a few acres of land 
near the Hudson, not far from what exultant land-agents now speak 
of as One hundred and Fiftieth Street ; where the thirteen trees, 
which he planted in commemoration of the original thirteen States, 
are now in a condition of umbrageous luxuriance, pleasing to behold 
eveu in a photograph. There he strove, during the pleasant sum- 
mer weeks, to forget politics in cultivating his garden ; and there he 
awaited the inevitable hour when Jeiferson's fanatical course should 
issue in that anarchy which he had so often foretold, and from which 
his puissant arm would deliver a misguided people. 



CHAPTER LXI. 

THE FIBST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 

Peace now fell upon tlie anxious minds of men. A vast content 
spread itself everywhere as tlie news of Jefferson's election was 
slowly borne in creaking vehicles over the wide, weltering mud of 
February and March. The tidings from abroad, too, were more and 
more re-assuring : a convention with Bonaparte was as good as con- 
cluded ; the Continent was pacificated by being terrified or subdued; 
and there were good hopes of that peace between Great Britain and 
France which was to follow before Jefferson had sent in his fi^rst mes- 
sage. Bonaparte, so terrible to Europe and to Federalists, seems 
always, if we may judge from his correspondence, to have cast friendly 
eyes across the Atlantic. In 1800, it is true, he ordered Fouche to 
notify " M. Payne," that the police was aware of his ill-conduct, and 
that, on the first complaint against him, he would be renvoye en Ame- 
rique, sa patrie ; but in 1801, about the time of Jefferson's inaugura- 
tion, he assigned to Robert Fulton ten thousand francs for the com- 
pletion of his experiment with the Nautilus at Brest. Fortunate 
Jefferson ! For the first time in eight years, an American administra- 
tion could look abroad over the ocean without shame and without fear. 
Peace at home, peace abroad, safety on the sea ! 

It becomes a conqueror to conciliate. Only gentle and benevolent 
feelings occupied the benign soul of Jefferson at this trying period. 
Those who look over his correspondence of the early weeks of 1801 
remark again what a precious, tranquillizing resource he had in na- 
ture, and in those "trivial fond records" that employ the naturalist's 
pen. His letters to philosophical friends, at the time when mis- 
guided men were intriguing to rob his country of its right to elect a 
chief magistrate, were more frequent and more interesting than usual. 
The bones of the mammoth, the effects of cold on human happiness, 

583 



584 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIT. 

the power of the moon over the weatlier, the temperature of moon- 
beams, the question of the turkey's native land, the peculiar rain- 
bows seen from Mouticello, and the nature of tlie circles round the 
moon, were subjects which had power to lure him from the contem- 
plation of the pitiful strifes around him. Nor did he forget his 
precious collections of Indian words. He tells one corresjjondent 
that he possesses already thirty vocabularies, and that he has it 
" much at heart to make as extensive a collection as possible of In- 
dian tongues ; " wondering to find the different languages so radically . 
different. When, at last, the political struggle was at an end, his 
first and only thought was to conciliate. He knew the suicidal char- 
acter of the error which the Federalists had committed; and he was 
glad of it, because it made his task of restoring parties to good- 
humor so much easier. " Weeks of ill-judged conduct here," he 
wrote to a friend a few days after the election in the House, "have 
strengthened us more than years of prudent and conciliatory admin- 
istration could have done. If we can once more get social inter- 
course restored to its pristine harmony, I shall believe we have not 
lived in vain." The leaders of the Federalists, he supposed, were 
"incorrigible:" they would, doubtless, continue to oppose and de- 
nounce ; but he hoped to convince the mass of their followers that 
the accession of the Republican party to power would not reverse all 
the beneficent laws of nature. 

If there is one tiling upon which the Tories of America and Great 
Britain plume themselves more than another, it is their superior 
breeding, their finer sense of what is due from one person to another 
in trying circumstances. The public has been frequently informed, 
that, when the Federalists fell from power in 1801, the " age of polite- 
ness passed away." The late Mr. Peter Parley Goodrich lamented 
the decline of "the good old country custom," of youngsters giving 
respectful salutation to their elders in passing. It was at this 
period, he tells us, that the well-executed bow " subsided, first, into a 
vulgar nod, half ashamed and half impudent, and then, like the pen- 
dulum of a dying clock, totally ceased." When Je9:erson came in, 
he adds, rudeness and irreverence were deemed the true mode for 
democrats ; a statement which he illustrates by one of his entertaining 
anecdotes. " How are you priest? " said a rough fellow to a clergy- 
man. "How are you, democrat?" was the clergyman's retort. 
" How do you know I am a democrat ? " asked the man. " How do 



THE FIRST REPUBLICAN' ADMINISTRATION. 585 

you know I am a priest ? " said the clergyman. " I know you to 
be a priest by your dress." " I knovy you to be a democrat by yom 
address," said the parson. 

Tliis anecdote, Mr. Goodrich assures us, in his humorous manner, 
is "strictly historical." I am afraid it is. And I fear that much of 
the superior breeding of the gentlemen of the old school, of which 
we are so frequently reminded, was a thing of bows and observ- 
ances ; which expressed the homage claimed by rank, instead of 
the respectful and friendly consideration due from man to man. 

In taking leave of power in 1801, the "gentlemen's party" 
revealed the innate vulgarity of the Tory soul. When I say vul- 
garity, I mean commonness, the absence of superiority, which is the 
precise signification of the word. Congress had acted upon Hamil- 
ton's suggestion of dividing the country into judicial districts, with 
a permanent United States court in each ; but they preserved only 
the shadow of his perfect apparatus of tyranny, — twenty-four dis-- 
trict courts in all, with powers not excessive. But when the fangs 
of a serpent have been extracted, the creature, in its writhing 
impotence, retains its power to disgust. This increase of the judi- 
ciary was believed to be only a device for providing elevated and 
coaiafortable places for Federalists, from the vantage-ground of which 
they could assail with more effect the Republican administration. 
The measure was not, in itself, a lofty style of politics ; but the 
manner in which the scheme was carried out bears the unquestion- 
ble stamp of — commonness. 

Mr. Adams's last day arrived. This odious judiciary law had been 
passed three weeks before ; but, owing to the delay of the Senate to 
act upon the nominations, the judges were still uncommissioned. 
The gentlemen's party had not the decency to leave so much as one 
of these valuable life-appointments to the incoming administration; 
nor any other vacancy whatever, of which tidings reached the seat 
of government in time. Nominations were sent to the Senate as 
late as nine o'clock in the evening of the 3d of March ; and Judge 
Marshall, the acting secretary of state, was in his office at mid- 
night, still signing commissions for men through whom another 
administration was to act. But the secretary and his busy clerks, 
precisely upon the stroke of twelve, were startled by an apparition. 
It was the bodily presence of Mr. Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts, 
whom the president elect had chosen for the office of attorney gen- 



686 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

eral. A conversation ensued between these two gentlemen, which 
has been recently reported for us by Mr. Jefferson's great-grand- 
daughter : * — 

Lincoln. I have been ordered by Mr. Jefferson to take posses- 
sion of this office and its papers. 

Marshall. Wh^^^, Mr. Jefferson has not yet qualified, 

Lincoln. Mr. Jefferson considers himself in the light of an 
executor, bound to take charge of the papers of the government 
until he is duly qualified. 

Marshall {taking out his watch). But it is not yet twelve 
o'clock. 

Lincoln (taking a watch from his pocket and showing it). 
This is the president's watch, and rules the hour. 

Judge Marshall felt that Mr. Lincoln was master of the situa- 
tion ; and; casting a rueful look upon the unsigned commissions 
spread upon the table, he left his midnight visitor in possession. 
E-elating the scene in after-years, when the Federalists had recov- 
ered a portion of their good humor, he used to say, laughing, that 
he had been allowed to pick up nothing but his hat. 

While these events were transpiring, Mr. Adams was preparing 
for that precipitate flight from the capital which gave the last 
humiliation to his party. He had not the courtesy to stay in 
Washington for a feyv hours, and give the eclat of his presence to 
the inauguration of his successor. Tradition reports that he 
ordered his carriage to be at the door of the White House at mid- 
night ; and we know, that, before the dawn of the 4th of March, 
he had left Washington forever. 

That day was celebrated throughout the United States like 
another 4th of July. Soldiers paraded, bells rang, orations were 
delivered, the Declaration of Independence was read, and in some 
of the Republican newspapers it was printed at length. In most 
towns of any importance a dinner was eaten in honor of the day, 
the toasts of which figured in the papers, duly numbered, and the 
precise number of cheers stated which each called forth. Sixteen 
was evidently considered the proper number for the president. In 

* Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, p. 308. 



THE FIRST KEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 587 

some instances, if we may believe the party-press, the Federalists 
paraded their disgust. No one can tell us now whether the great 
bell of Christ Church in Philadelphia reallj- did "toll all day," 
when the news of Jefferson's election reached the city ; nor whether, 
on the 4th of March, a ship-owner, on going to the wharf and 
finding his vessel dressed with flags, flew into a passion, and swore 
he would sell out his share in her if the flags were not taken in. 
Nothing is too absurd to be believed of human prejudice. 

Of the ceremonies at Washington the records of the time give 
us the most meagre accounts. Boswell, the father of interviewing, 
had no representative in America then ; and journalism was con- 
tent to print little more than the inaugural address. It is only 
from the accidental presence of an English traveller that we know 
in what manner Mr. Jefferson was conveyed to the Capitol that 
morning. He had no establishment in Washington. "Jack 
Eppes," his son-in-law, was completing somewhere in Virginia the 
purchase of four coach-horses, — price, $1,600, — with which the 
president elect hoped to contend triumphantly with the yellow 
mud of Washington. But, as neither horses nor coach had yet 
arrived, he went to the Capitol in his usual way. "His dress," as 
our traveller, John Davis, informs us, " was of plain cloth, and he 
rode on horseback to the Capitol without a single guard or even 
servant in his train, dismounted without assistance, and hitched the 
bridle of his horse to the palisades." In composing the inaugural 
address (fitter to be read on the Fourth of July than the Declara- 
tion of Independence), he evidently put his heart and strength 
into the passages which called upon estranged partisans to be fellow- 
citizens once more : — 

" Every diff"erence of opinion is not a difference of principle. 
We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. 
We ai'e all Eepublicans : we are all Federalists. If there be any 
among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change 
its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of 
the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where rea- 
son is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest 
meii fear that a republican government cannot be strong, — that this 
government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, 
in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government 



588 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

whicTi lias so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and vis- 
ionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may by 
possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe 
this, on the contrary, the strongest on earth. I believe it the only 
one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the 
standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order 
as his own personal concern." 

In 1801 this was theory. In 1861 it was fact. 

Happy, indeed, was the change which that day came oyer the 
aspect of American politics. No longer was the spectacle exhibited 
of the government pulling one way, and the people another. The 
people of the United States ruled the United States; and they 
were served by men who owned their rightful mastery. That ele- 
ment which resisted the Stamp Act, and declared independence, was 
uppermost again. "Old Coke " and Algernon Sidney were in the 
ascendent. The hard hand that held the plough, the thick muscle 
that wielded the hammer, the pioneer out on the deadly border-line 
between savage and civilized man, and all the mighty host of toil- 
ing men, gained something of dignity and self-esteem by the change. 
The old Whig chiefs, who for two or three years past had been 
avoided, reviled, cut, by their juniors and inferiors, could look up 
again, and exchange glad salutations. The old men of the ante- 
Revolution time were coming into vogue once more, and Jefferson 
used all the prestige of his office in their behalf. 

A graceful act of manly homage (like king Hal's greeting to 
"old Sir Thomas Erpingham" on the morning of Agincourt*) was 
that letter which President Jefferson, amid the hurry and distrac- 
tion of his first days of power, found time to write to Samuel Adams, 
then verging upon fourscore, past service, but not past love and 
veneration. It was so good and gentleman-like in Jefferson to 
think of the old hero at such a time ; and it was becoming in Y^^^" 
ginia tlius again, as in the great years preceding the Revolution, 
to greet congenial Massachusetts. And how gracefully the president 
acquitted himself: "I addressed a letter to you, my very dear and 
ancient friend, on the 4th of March ; not, indeed, to you by name, 
but through the medium of some of my fellow-citizens, whom occa- 

* Henry V., act iv. scene 1. 



THE riEST REPUBLIC AK ADMIKISTRATION. 589 

sion called on me to address. In meditating the matter of that 
address, I often asked myself, •' Is this exactly in the spirit of the 
patriarch, Samuel Adams ? Is it as he would express it ? Will he 
approve of it?' I have felt a great deal for our country in the 
times we have seen, but individually for no one so much as your- 
self. When I have been told that you were avoided, insul^ed^ 
frowned upon, I could but ejaculate, ' Father, forgive them ; for they 
know not what they do ! ' I confess I felt an indignation for you 
which for myself I have been able, under every 'trial, to keep 
entirely passive. However, the storm is over, and we are in port. 
The ship was not rigged for the service she was put on. We will 
show the smoothness of her motions on her Republican tack." And 
he goes on to tell the old man how intent he is upon restoring har- 
mony in the country, — an object to which he is ready to " sacrifice 
every thing but principle." " How much I lament," concluded the 
president, "that time has deprived me of your_ aid. It would have 
been a day of glory which should have called you to the first office of 
the administration. But give us your counsel, mj^ friend, and give 
us your blessing ! " We can imagine the radiant countenance of this' 
venerable man, so august in his poverty and isolation, as he held 
this letter in his palsied hand, and slowly gatheredcits contents. - 

Dr. Priestley, too, who had been an object of envenomed attaclc, 
and menaced with expulsion under the Alien Law, received cordial 
recognition, and a warm invitation to visit the seat of g'pvernmeut. 
"I should claim the right to lodge you," said the presiden+,\'''should 
yorf make such an excursion." He evidently felt it a public duty to 
atone; in. some degree, for the inhospitality with which the United 
States had appeared to treat the first man eminent in original 
science who ever emigrated to the western continent. " It is with 
heartfelt satisfaction," he wrote to him, "that in the first moments 
of my public action I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender 
to y«ii the honiage of its respect and est*m, cover j^ou under 
the protection of those laws which were made for the good and wise 
like you, and disdain the legitimacy of that libel on legislation, 
which, under the form of a law, was for some time placed among 
them." 

Before Dr. Priestley had the pleasure of reading these lines, he 
had enjoyed the greater one of knowing, that, among President 
Jefi"erson's first acts, was the pardoning of every man in the country 



590 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

who was in prison under the Sedition Law. Jefferson used to say 
that he considered that law "a nullity as absolute and palpable as 
if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden 
image." Tlie victims of the Alien Law were beyond his reach; 
but some of them, who could be fitly consoled by epistolary notice, 
Kosciuszko, Volney, and others, received friendly letters from the 
president. 

A gallant, high-bred act it was in Jefferson not to shrink from 
the odium of recognizing the claim which Thomas Paine had to the 
regards of a Republican president. The ocean, for some years past, 
had not been a safe highway for a man whom both belligerents 
looked upon as an enemy; and Paine had, in consequence, expressed 
a wish for a passage home in a naval vessel. The first national 
ship that sailed for France after Mr. Jefferson's inauguration carried 
a letter from the president to Mr. Paine^ offering him a passage in 
that vessel on its return. "I am in hopes," he wrote, "that you will 
find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. 
In these it will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as 
much effect as any man living." This must have been comforting 
to a man who, having been first driven from England, then threat- 
ened with expulsion from France, and warned by the Sedition Law 
from entering the United States, might have been truly described, 
before the 4th of March, 1801, as "the man without a country." 
Enriched though he had been by the gratitude of America, he had 
been living in Paris for some time past in poverty and squalor, his 
American property being little productive in the absence of the 
owner. Mr. Jefferson's letter found him the occupant of " a little 
dirt3'^ room, containing a small wooden table and two chairs." An 
old English friend, who visited him not long after he had received 
it, described Paine's abode, which he had much trouble to find, as 
being the dirtiest apartment he ever sat down in. " Tlie chimney- 
hearth was a heap OT dirt," he adds: " there was not a speck of 
cleanliness to be seen. Three shelves were filled with pasteboard 
boxes, each labelled after the manner of a minister of foreign affairs, 
— Correspondance Britannique, Prangaise, etc. In one corner of 
the room stood several huge bars of iron, curiously shaped, and two 
large trunks ; opposite the fireplace, a board covered with pamphlets 
and journals, having more the appearance of a dresser in a scullery 
than a sideboard." 



THE FIRST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 591 

The occupant of this doleful room, then sixty-five years of age, 
soon came clown stairs dressed in a long flannel gown, and weai'ing 
Ib his haggard ftice an expression of the deepest melancholy. His 
conversation showed that he was in full sympathy with the little band 
of Frenchmen whom Bonaparte had not dazzled out of their senses. 
He had dared even to translate and print Jefferson's Inaugural 
Address, "by way of contrast," as he said, "with the government 
of tlie First Consul." But he had lost all hope of France. " This 
is not a country," he said, " for an honest man to live in : they do 
not understand any thing at all of the principles of free government, 
and the best way is to leave them to themselves. You see, they 
have conquered all Europe, only to make it more miserable than it 
was before. Republic! Do you call this a republic ? Why, they 
are worse off tlian the slaves at Constantinople ; for there they 
expect to be bashaws in heaven by submitting to be slaves here 
below. But here they believe neitlier in heaven nor hell, and yet 
are slaves \>y choice ! I know of no republic in the world except 
America, which is the only countrj^ for such men as j^ou and me. 
I have done with Europe and its slavish politics." He gave his 
visitor Mr. Jefferson's letter to read, and said he meant soon to 
avail himself of its offer. " It would be a curious circumstance," he 
added, laughing, " if I should hereafter be sent as secretary of 
legation to the English Court which outlawed me. What a hubbub 
it would create at the king's levee to see Tom Paine presented by 
the American ambassador ! All the bishops and women would 
faint away." His guest frankly told him that the course of events 
had caused him to change his principles. Paine's answer was, 
" You certainly have the right to do so, but you cannot alter the 
nature of things. The French have alarmed all honest men; but, 
still, truth is truth." 

Poor Paine ! His errors were, for the most part, those of his age ; 
and they were aggravated by his circumstances, nis defective educa- 
tion, and the ardor of his temperament. But his merits, which were 
real and not small, were peculiarly his own. He loved the truth for 
its own sake ; and he stood by what he conceived to be the truth 
when all the world around him reviled it. That hasty pamphlet of 
his which he named The Age of Reason, written to alleviate the 
tedium of his Paris prison, differs from other deistical works only in 
being bolder and honester. It contains not a position which Frank- 



592 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

lin, Jolm Adams, Jefferson, and Theodore Parker would have dis- 
sented from ; aud, doubtless, he spoke the truth when he declared 
that his main purpose in writing it was to " insj)ire mankind with a 
more exalted idea of the Supreme Architect of the Universe." I 
think his judgment must have been impaired before he could have 
consented to publish so inadequate a performance. In a remarkably 
convivial age, he sang a very good song, and often favored a jovial 
company, after dinner, M'ith ditties of his own composition. This 
ever-welcome talent, joined to the vivacity of mind which naturally 
expends itself in agreeable conversation, made him in his best days 
the delight of his circle, and lured him, perhaps, into habits that pre- 
vented his ripening into happiness and wisdom ; for no man can 
attain welfare who does not obey the physical laws of his being. It 
becomes us, however, to deal charitably with the faults of a benefac- 
tor who wrote The Crisis and Common Sense, who conceived the 
planing-machine and the iron bridge. A glorious monument in his 
honor swells aloft in many of our great towns. The principle of his 
arch now sustains the marvellous railroad depots that half abolish the 
distinction between in doors and out. 

Nearlj' every other man whom Jefferson singled out for distinction 
had suffered, in some special manner, during the recent contests. 
Madison, after bearing the brunt of many a battle in the House of 
Representatives, retired at last, almost despairing of the republic, 
and went home to make a new stand in the legislature of Virginia. 
His father, too, far advanced in years, needed his constant aid in the 
management of an extensive estate that only a master's eye could 
render profitable. Now he was coming back to the seat of govern- 
ment as secretary of state ! The declining strength of his. father 
warned him not to leave his home for the inauguration, and the old 
man died a few days after. The news of Mr. Madison's nomination 
to the cabinet, and that of his father's death, reached the public at 
the same time. * 

This is an interesting sentence in the will of Thomas Jefferson, 
especially to those who know something of the friendship which sub- 
sisted between the illustrious democrat and the greatest of his dis- 
ciples : — 

" I give to my old friend, James Madison of Montpelier, my gold- 
mounted walking-staff of animal horn, as a token of the cordial and 



THE FIRST EEPUBLICAX ADMINISTRATION. 693 

affectionate friendship, wliicli, for nearly now an half-century, has 
united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have 
deemed for the greatest good of our country." 

This passage was written in March, 1826, a few months "before the 
death of the testator. The friendship of wliich it speaks was the 
controlling influence in the public career of Mr. Madison, and an 
event of the greatest importance in that of Mr. Jefferson. It made 
Madison president, and secured to Jefferson the successor best fitted 
of all living men to continue the Jeffersonian system, 

James Madison, born in Virginia in 1751, was the son of James 
Madison, a wealthy tobacco -planter, ar' descendant from John 
Madison, an English gentleman who came to Virginia about the year 
ICoO. The eldest son of a thriving planter, he received an education 
remarkable for its extent and thoroughness. In those days it was 
customary for the parish clergyman of Virginia to prepare pupils for 
college. James Madison had this advantage, and at the age of 
eighteen went to Princeton College in New Jersey, from which he 
graduated after a residence of only two years. He continued, how- 
ever, to reside at Princeton for another year, during which he pur- 
sued his studies as a kind of private pupil of the president. He 
committed at this period an error, from the effects of which he never 
wholly recovered during all his long life of eighty-five years. Hav- 
ing an insatiable thirst for knowledge, he allowed himself but three 
hours' sleep, and devoted almost all the rest of the day to study ; and 
even when warned of the folly of this course by the failure of his 
health, he continued to over-exert himself, although in a less degree. 

In the year 1772, when he was twenty-one years of age, he returned 
to his native State, and there began the study of the law; which he 
pursued with the same zeal and devotion, without discontinuing his 
general studies. His biographer tells us that his attention was 
drawn powerfully at t-his time to the study of theology, which he 
continued to investigate until he had satisfied himself respecting its 
nature and its claims. 

The Revolutionary War was impending. Among the subjects of 
agitation then in Virginia, was the connection between Churcli and 
State, which existed in Virginia as completely as in the mother 
country ; so that every denomination except one labored under obvi- 
ous and serious disadvantages. James Madison, as we have seen, 
§8 



594 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

was among th« young men who favored the dissolution of this unnat- 
ural tie, and on this isslie was elected, in the spring of 1776, a mem- 
ber of the Virginia legislature. Almost the only knowledge we 
have of liis early parliamentary career is derived from an interesting 
passage in the autobiography of Mr. Jefferson. 

" Mr. Madison," he says, " came into the House in 1776, a new 
member and young; which circumstances, concurring with his 
extreme modesty, prevented his venturing himself in debate before 
his removal to the Council of State in November, 1777. From tbence 
he went to Congress, then consisting of a few members. Trained iu 
in three successive schools, he acquired a habit of self-possession, 
which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous 
and discriminating mind and of his extensive information, and ren- 
dered liim the first of every assembly afterwards of which he became 
a member. Never wandering from his subject into vain declama- 
tion, but pursuing it closely, in language pure, classical, and copious, 
soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and soft- 
ness of expression, lie rose to the eminent station which he held in 
the great national convention of 1787; and in that of Virginia which 
followed, he sustained the new constitution in all its parts, bearing 
off the palm against the logic of George Mason and the fervid decla- 
mation of Mr. Henry. With these consummate powers were united 
a pure and spotless virtue, which calumny in vain attempted to sully." 

This is a noble tribute. So glowing is it, that manj^ persons have 
thought it exaggerated, and attributed it to the affectionate regard 
which a good master naturally feels for the chief of his disciples ; 
but this is not the case. I have been assured b}'' the Hon. Nicholas 
P. Trist, the son-in-law and executor of Mr. Jefferson, that there 
was no man to whose understanding Mr. Jefferson more sincerely 
deferred, or for whose character he had so complete a respect, as for 
that of James Madison. 

What a change, too, for Albert Grallatin to find himself at the head 
of the treasury department ! We can estimate his services to 
Republicanism by the singular intensity of the hatred borne him by 
the Federalists. From 1793, when Pennsylvania elected him to rep- 
resent her in the Senate of the United States, their aversion, as much 
as his own merit, had kept his name conspicuous. 



THE PIEST EEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 595 

Aliraham Albert Alplionse de Gallatin was born at Geneva, in 
Switzerland, in 1761. In the letters of Voltaire, who lived two or 
three miles from Geneva, there are many allusions to the family of 
Gallatin, which was one of the most ancient and respectable of Swit- 
zerland; and I presume Albert Gallatin must have often seen Vol- 
taire in his boyhood, and perhaps conversed with him. Among the 
connections of the family was the celebrated Madame de Stael. 
Graduating from the University of Geneva in 1779, he refused the 
brilliant offer of a lieutenant-colonelcy in a German regiment, for the 
express purpose of comipg over to America, as Lafayette had done 
a year or two before, and joining the patriot army ixnder General 
Washington. 

It was. in the spring of 1780, that the vessel in which he sailed to 
America was obliged to put into a harbor on the coast of Massachu- 
setts, and the young enthusiast came on shore. On landing he went 
to the nearest tavern; and there, to his equal astonishment and 
delight, he met with some Swiss lately from Geneva, who were 
acquainted with his famil3^ They were on their way to a settlement 
in Maine, where they intended to reside. Overjoyed at this coinci- 
dence, he joined the party, and went with them to Machias, where he 
at once enlisted in a company of volunteers about to march to the 
defence of a threatened point ; and he was soon appointed to com- 
mand a post of some importance, garrisoned by a body of militia and 
Indians. Being the son of a wealthy family, he had brought with 
him a little money, something less than a thousand dollar's; and his 
troops being in need of the most indispensable supplies, he advanced 
the greater part of his money for their relief, receiving in return an 
order on the treasury of the United States. At the end of the cam- 
paign, being in Boston, and having spent all the rest of his cash, he 
presented his order for payment, and was informed that the treasury 
was empty. He was obliged to sell his order for one-third of its 
value ; so, for his six hundred dollars, he received two hundred. 

The war ended, he looked about him for employment, and found it 
at Harvard College, where he taught French during the year 1783. 
On coming of age he received from Switzerland his share of his 
father's estate, with which he went to Virginia and bought a tract of 
land in the western part of the State. It was there that he had his 
celebrated interview with General Washington, which he often 
related, and which was published some years ago in a literary journal. 



596 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

It occurred in a log-house, fourteen feet square, consisting of one 
room, which was furnished with a bed, a pine table, and a bench or 
two. General Washington, who owned large tracts of land in that 
region, had invited some of the settlers and hunters acquainted with 
the country, to meet him at this log-hut, for the purpose of talking 
over and settling upon the best pass for a road through the Alle- 
ghany Mountains. Attracted by curiosity to see so celebrated a 
person, Gallatin was present. 

When General Washington came in (Mr. Gallatin used to sa}') he 
took his seat at the pine table ; and all tlie hunters of the country 
stood up around it, except a few who found seats upon the bed. The 
general questioned them, and noted down their replies upon paper. 
He was very particular in his inquiries, &nd continued his questioning 
for some time after the young Swiss thought he had discovered, not 
only the best pass, but the only one available' for the purpose. Being 
a little impatient at the apparent indecision of tlie general, he sud- 
denly interrupted him, without reflecting upon the impropriety of his 
conduct, and said, — 

" Oh, it is plain enough ! such a place (mentioning the one in his 
mind) is the most practicable." 

The people present stared at the young man with much surprise, 
marvelling at his boldness in giving his opinion before the general 
had asked it. Washington paused, laid down his pen, lifted his eyes 
from the paper, and looked sternly at the young foreigner, evidently 
offended, but uttered not a word. He resumed his inquiries, and 
continued to question the hunters for some time longer, when he 
suddenly stopped, and, throwing down his pen, said to the stranger, — 

" You are right, sir." 

In commenting upon this scene, Mr. Gallatin used to say, — 

" It was so on all occasions with General Washington. He was 
slow in forming an opinion, and never decided until he knew he 
was right." 

The warlike Indians of Western Virginia prevented his settling 
the lands he had purchased ; and he went to reside upon a farm in 
Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Monongahela, not far from Pitts- 
burg. There, besides carrying on a farm, he founded the glass 
manufacture, which has since grown to such proportions, that, at the 
present time, about one-half of all the glass used in the United 
States is made within a few miles of the spot where Albert Gallatin 
began it about 1790. 



THE FIEST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 59T 

He was soon drawn into public life. Upon the division of parties 
during Washington's first term, Albert Gallatin sided with Jeffer- 
son and the Democracy, and made himself conspicuous by the bold- 
ness and decision with which he advocated Democratic principles. 
The whole country rang with his name in 1793, when, after having 
boen elected a United States senator by the legislature of Pennsyl- 
vania, his right to the seat was denied by the Federal senators. 
The Constitution requires that a senator, if not a native of the United 
States, must have been a citizen for nine years. The question was 
this : Did Gallatin's citizenship begin on the day he landed in 
Massachusetts, tlilrteen years before, or did it begin on the day he 
swore allegiance to the republic in 1785, which was only eight years 
before. After a debate of eight weeks, the Senate decided, by a strict 
party vote of fourteen Federalists to twelve Democrats, that his citi- 
zenship began when he took the oath. This affair was really benefi-' 
cial to Albert Gallatin, because the Democratic party deemed that 
he had been the subject of an outrage. They regarded him as an 
injured man. 

At the time of the whiskey insurrection, though he sympathized 
warmly with the insurrectionists, he opposed all violent measures, and 
was greatly instrumental in bringing the affair to a peaceful conclu- 
sion. The great period of his life began in 1795, when the people 
of Western Pennsylvania elected him to the House of Representa- 
tives, where he distinguished himself by the vigor of his opposition 
to Federal measures. 

His enemies were again incoilsiderate enough to confer upon him 
the distinction of an outrage. In February, 1799, when he was 
exerting every faculty in opposition to the Alien Law, tlie majority 
held a caucus, and resolved to make no answer whatever to any thing 
that might be said against either the Alien or the Sedition Law. Gal- 
latin rose in the House to urge their repeal. For a short time he was 
heard in contemptuous silence. Then honorable members began to 
converse, laugh, talk, cough, move about ; and made at last so loud a 
noise, that, as Jefferson remarked at the time, the speaker must have 
had the lungs of an auctioneer to be heard. Perhaps he may have 
thought of this scandalous scene when he sent to the Senate, two 
years after, the name of Albert Gallatin for secretary of the treas- 
ury. 

Levi Lincoln, the new attorney-general; had a taste in common 



598 LIFE OF THOISIAS JEFFEESON. 

with the president. He loved science. Another remarkable quali- 
fication was, that he was a distinguished Massachusetts lawyer, — 
at the head of the bar of that State for several years, — and yet not a 
Federalist. These two facts, if we may believe the controversial writ- 
ings of the day, bore to one another the relation of cause arid effect. 

Henry Dearborn of Maine, whom Mr. Jefferson appointed secre- 
tary of war, had been a veritable hero of romance. In 1775 he was 
a village doctor. For three j'ears the sign of Dr. Dearborn had 
hung out in a hamlet of New Hampshire, when a horseman on a 
panting steed brought the news of the battle of Lexington. 
Before the sun had set that day, the ^''onng doctor, splendid with the 
glow of perfect health and the elastic grace of twenty-four, led sixty 
men toward Cambridge, sixty-five miles distant, which he reached 
soon after sunrise on the day following. At Bunker Hill he was a 
•captain; but, as there was nothing to do there but load and fire, he 
took a musket, and made one of his company, loading and firing 
with the rest as long as they had any thing to put into their guns. 
He went with Arnold's thousand men on that march through an 
untrodden wilderness to join Montgomery in an attack upon Quebec. 
The wonder was, that a man of them escaped starvation. Captain 
Dearborn had with him a magnificent dog, the favorite of all the 
company, and to himself most dear ; but he could not resist the 
entreaties of starving comrades, and gave him up, at length, to some 
soldiers, who took the dog to their quarters, and divided his flesh, 
with fine Yankee self-control, among the men who could least help 
themselves, who were nearest perishing. " They ate every part of 
him," wrote his master, " not excepting his entrails ; and, after fin- 
ishing their meal, they collected the bones and carried them to be 
pounded up, and to make broth for another meal." The only other 
dog attached to the expedition, a small one, had been privately killed 
and eaten before. Men sacrificed their "old breeches " made of 
moosehide ; boiled them long, and then cut them into slices, and 
broiled them on the coals. A barber's powder-bag was made into 
soup at last. It excited the wonder of the doctor-captain to see men 
keep up with their company until they were so near exhaustion that 
they would breathe their last four or five minutes after sitting down. 
Dearborn himself gave out at length, and lay in a hut for ten days 
at the point of death. But he rallied, trudged after the army, and 
went to the assault at the head of his command. 



THE FIRST EEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 599 

In this spirit and in this manner Heniy Dearborn served till the 
surrender of Cornwallis, which he witnessed. On General Washing- 
ton's staff, as quartermaster-general, he acquired that familiarity 
with military business which made him at home in the office in which 
Mr. Jeiferson placed him. President Washingtcm had appointed 
him marshal of the district of Maine, and the people had elected him 
twice to the House of Representatives. He was a large, handsome 
man, of erect, graceful, military bearing; a striking figure in the circles 
of the city that was rising in the primeval wilderness. He was, 
perhaps, the only public man in the country who united all the 
qualities desirable for his post ; being a soldier, a Republican, a man 
of science, and a man of business. 

In bestowing the great places of the government, Jefferson evi- 
dently had it in view to exalt and stimulate the intellectual side of 
human nature, then under a kind of ban in Christendom. Every 
member of his cabinet was college-bred; and every man of them 
was in some peculiar way identified with knowledge. Madison was, 
above all things else, a student of constitutional science as well as 
of constitutional law. Gallatin, the founder of the glass manufac- 
ture of Pittsburg, was accomplished in the science of his day, em- 
inently an intellectual ized person. Dearborn, a graduate of Har- 
vard, had also been admitted to one of the learned professions. 
Robert Smith of Maryland, secretary of the navj^, a graduate of 
Princeton, after long eminence at the bar and in public life, died 
president of the Agricultural Society and provost of the University 
of IMaryland. Gideon Granger of Connecticut, post-master-gen- 
eral, a graduate of Yale, a lawyer of learning and high distinction, 
fought through the Connecticut legislature the liberal school-fund 
to which that State is so much indebted. He was noted, all his life, 
as the intelligent and public-spirited friend of every thing high and 
advanced. It was he who promoted internal improvements in a 
manner to which the strictest constructionist could not object, by 
giving a thousand acres of land for the benefit of the Erie Canal. 
Chancellor Livingston, whom Mr. Jefferson invited to his cabinet, 
and induced to go as minister to France, was the most liberal patron 
science had yet found in America. A graduate of King's College 
in New York, he spent his leisure and his income in promoting 
science, art, and agriculture. It was his intelligent faith and his 
liberal outlay of money that enabled Robert Fulton to carry out 



600 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

John Eitch's idea of a steamboat. James Monroe, the least learned 
of the men whom Jefferson advanced, could give a glorious reason 
why he was not a graduate of a college. The battle of Lexingtoa 
called him away from William and Mary to the camp at Cambridge. 
Let it be noted, then, as an interesting fact in political history, 
that the first Democratic administration paid homage to the higher 
attainments of man, and sought aid from the class farthest removed 
from the uninstructed multitude. If Jefferson had not done this 
from principle, he would have done it from calculation ; because, 
knowing the people as he did, he was aware that the farther they 
get from bowing down to fictitious distinctions, the more alive they 
become to those which are real. At the same time, he did not over- 
value learning. "It is not by his reading in Coke-Littleton," he 
wrote to the brother of Robert Smith, "that I am induced to this 
proposition (offering him the Navy Department), thougli that also 
will be of value in our administration ; but from a confidence that 
he must, from his infancy, have been so familiarized with naval 
things, that he will be perfectly competent to select proper agents 
and to judge of their conduct." From that day to this, as often as 
Mr. Jefferson's example has been followed in this particular, the 
people of the United States have been gratified. What appoint- 
ments more popular than those of Irving, Goodrich, Hawthorne, 
Bancroft, Kennedy, and Curtis ? 

An American president usually has something to do besides man- 
aging the affairs of the public. After making the first arrange- 
ments, Jefferson went home for a month to put his own affairs in 
train for a long absence, to select books for removal, and give time 
for the members of his cabinet to remove to Washington. The 
city was miserably incomplete and unprovided. Only ten months 
had passed since Philadelphians, going by the office of the secretary 
of state, had read on a placard the official notice of the removal of 
the government to the tract of wilderness which had been despoiled 
of its primeval beauty, and named after the Father of his Country. 
These were the words they read: "Notice. — The office of the 
Department of State will be removed this day from Philadelphia. 
All letters and applications are therefore to be addressed to that 
department at the city of Washington from this date, 28th May, 
1800." The day before. President Adams began his journey toward 
the new capital, going "by way of Lancaster and Fredericksburg." 



THE FIRST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTIlATIOlsr. 601 

When Mrs. Adams joined him, she was ill-advised enough to go by 
Baltimore; and a nice time she had of it. Between Baltimore and 
Washington, th'e forest had not a break. Soon after leaving Balti- 
more, her coachman lost his way, went eight or nine miles wrong,' 
then tried to get back through the forest to the right road, and 
wandered two hours without finding a creature of whom to ask a 
question ; until, at last, a straggling negro came along, whom they 
hired as a guide. Wasliington she discovered to be all promise and 
no performance ; every thing begun and nothing finished ; no bells 
in the presidential mansion ; no fence about it ; the grand staircase 
not up ; and the great rooms unfurnished. She used the unplas- 
tered east room that winter for drying clothes. 

If the president's house was in such a condition, we may con- 
clude, that, if the president and cabinet meant to be comfortable, 
they must lend a hand to the work themselves. They were going 
to live in a city of huts and small unfinished houses, with here and 
there a marble palace rising above the trees, and a great street of 
rich yellow clay piercing the forest, three miles long, a hundred feet 
wide, and two feet deep, — " the best city in the world for a future 
residence," as Gouverneur Morris remarked to one of his fair corre- 
spondents. "We want nothing here," said he, "but houses, cellars, 
kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles 
of this kind, to make our city perfect." 

Besides sending many a load of books and other articles by way 
of beginning, Jefferson kept a wagon going pretty frequently 
between Monticello and Washington during the whole of his presi- 
dency. Before leaving home he wrote curiously minute directions 
for his steward, Mr. Edmund Bacon. His heart was set upon 
restoring and enlarging a mill for grinding the grain of the region 
round about : that must be pushed to completion. Then there were 
fences to be made, fields to be cleared, a new variety of corn to be 
tried, charcoal to be burned, the garden to be levelled, pork to be 
bought, the nailery to be kept going, clothing to be provided, groves 
to be thinned, shrubs to be pruned, the building to continue. Con- 
cerning all these labors, Mr. Jefferson left precise instructions, and 
kept them in mind at all times. Take this brief passage of his 
last orders in April, 1801, as a specimen of the kind of directions 
he frequently gave while he was apparently absorbed in affairs of 
state : — 



602 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

"I have hired all the hands belonging to Mrs. and Miss Danger- 
field for the next year. They are nine in number. Moses the 
miller is to be sent home when his year is up. With these will 
"work in common, Isaac, Charles, Ben, Shepherd, Abram, Davy, 
John, and Shoemaker Phill ; making a gang of seventeen hands. 
Martin is the miller, and Jerry will drive his wagon. Those who 
work in the nailery are Moses, Wormly, James Hubbard, Barnaby, 
Isbel's Davy, Bedford John, Bedford Davy, Phill Hubbard, Bartlet, 
and Lewis. They are sufficient for two fires, five at a fire. I am 
desirous a single man, a smith, should be hired to work with them, 
to see that their nails are well made, and to superintend them gen- 
erally ; if such an one can be found for a hundred and fifty or two hun- 
dred dollars a year, though I would rather give him a share in the 
nails made, say one-eighth of the price of all the nails made, deduct- 
ing the cost of the iron : if such a person can be got, Isbel's Davy 
may be withdrawn to drive the mule-wagon, and Samson to join the 
laborers. There will then be nine nailers, besides the manager, so 
that ten may still work at two fires ; the manager to have a log-house 
built, and to have five hundred pounds of pork. The nails are to be 
sold by Mr. Bacon, and the accounts to be kept by him ; and he is 
to direct at all times what nails are to be made. 'The toll of the mill 
is to be put away in the two garners made, which are to liave 
secure locks, and Mr. Bacon is to keep the keys. When they are get- 
ting too full, the wagons should carry the grain to the overseer's house, 
to be carefidly stowed away. In general, it will be better to use all 
the bread-corn from the mill from week to week, and only bring away 
the surplus. Mr. Bandolph is hopper-free and toll-free at the mill. 
Mr. Eppes, having leased his plantation and gang, they are to pay 
toll hereafter. Clothes for the people are to be got from Mr. Higgin- 
botham, of the kind heretofore got. I allow them a best striped 
blanket every three years. This j^ear eleven blankets must be bought, 
and given to those most in need, noting to whom they are given. The 
hirelings, if they had not blankets last year, must have them this 
year. Mrs. Randolph always chooses the clothing for the house-ser- 
vants ; that is to saj', for Peter Henings, Burwell, Edwin, Critta, 
and Sally. Colored plaids are provided for Betty Brown, Betty 
Henlugs, Kance, Ursula, and indeed all the others. The nailers, 
laborers, and hirelings may have it, if they prefer it to cotton. 
Wool is given for stockings to those who will have it spun and knit 



THE FIRST EEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION^ 603 

for themselves. Fish is always to be got from Kichmond, and to be 
dealt out to ,the hirelings, laborers, workmen, and house-servants of 
all sorts, as has been usual. Six hundred pounds of pork is to be 
provided for the overseer, five hundred pounds for Mr. Stewart, and 
five hundred pounds for the superintendent of the nailery, if one is 
employed ; also about nine hundred pounds more for the people, so 
as to give them half a pound apiece once a week. This will require, 
in the whole, two thousand or two thousand five hundred pounds. 
After seeing what the plantation can furnish, and the three 
hogs at the mill, the residue must be purchased. In the winter 
a hogshead of molasses must be provided and brought up, which 
Mr. Jefferson (merchant at Kichmond) will furnish. This will afibrd 
to give a gill apiece to everybody once or twice a week." 

No interest of his plantation was too trifling to escape his atten- 
tion. He did not disdain to remind Mr. Bacon that " the old gar- 
den pales " w^anted patching up, nor omit to designate the two men 
nvost fit for the job. When all else had been provided for, he adds . 
by way of postscript, that, as "these rains have possibly spoiled the 
fodder you had agreed for, you had better see it, and, if injured, 
look out in time for more." And yet another word : If Mr. Bacon 
would prefer to "take his half beef ?iow," he might kill an animal 
for the purpose, and send the other half to the house or to Mr. 
Handolph's. 

A man does not govern a commonwealth the worse for having 
been trained in a homely school like tliis. Such training, of course, 
would not be sufficient ; but, even of itself, it would bring an intel- 
ligent mind nearer the secret of genuine statesmanship than Bona-, 
parte's military school or Pitt's parliamentary arena. 

Early in May the members of the administration were in Wash- 
ington, and Mr. Jefferson addressed himself to the task which his 
countrymen had assigned him. 



CHAPTER LXII. 

JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 

One thing only is indisputable with regard to the administration 
of Thomas Jefferson, from 1801 to 1809 : it satisfied the people of the 
United States. The proof of this is not merely that he was re- 
elected by a vastly increased majority; nor. that the Federalists, 
once so powerful and so confident, were reduced in the House to 
twenty-seven, and in the Senate to one less than half a dozen ; nor 
that the legislatures of Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Mary- 
land, and Georgia, the Senate of New York, and the House of Dele- 
gates of Virginia, requested him to stand for a third term ; nor that, 
at last, fourteen States out of seventeen were ranged in the Republi- 
can line, and Jefferson himself thought the ojDposition was getting 
too weak for the country's good. These were remarkable facts, but 
they were only a part of his triumph. At the end of eight years, 
without an effort of his own, without so much as the expression of a 
preference, he handed over the govei'nment to the man of all others 
in the woi'ld whom he would have chosen for a successor; and that 
man, at the end of his eight years, passed it on to another of Jeffer- 
son's disciples and allies, under whom opposition died, only to live 
again when Federalism started into a semblance of life in the mes- 
sages of John Quincy Adams. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe 
were three men and one system. The era of good feeling in Mon- 
roe's time, which would have come in Madison's but for the war of 
1812, was the completion of Jefferson's success. It is this twenty- 
four years of public content that renders an inquiry into the conduct 
of President Jefferson interesting. 

For, as all readers know, there are two ways of explaining it. To 
republicans, indeed, it requires no explanation. It is of the essence 
of their faith, that there is nothing occult or mysterious in the art^ 

601 



JEFFEKSON PRESIDENT. 605 

of government, but that it consists in doing right. Their simple 
conviction is, — and they desire the Coming Party to ponder well 
the truth, — that the old Democratic party ruled the United States 
for sixty years for no other reason than that, on every leading issue 
except one, — the extension of slaver}', the rock on which it struck 
and went to pieces, — the ohl Democratic party was right. The 
other theory is, that Mr. Jefferson and his successors were wonder- 
fully skilful and perfectly unscrupulous in flattering what the polite 
Federalists used to style the Mob. Readers remember, perhaps, 
Tom Moore's verses on this subject, written soon after his visit to 
Washington, in which, putting into rhyme the gossip and sniff of 
Federalist drawing-rooms, he spoke of President Jefferson as 

"That iiifflorions soul, 
Which creeps and winds beneath a mob's control, 
Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabl)le's nod, 
And makes, like Egypt, every beast its god." 

This was the Federalists' opinion better expressed; and they used 
to point to Aaron Burr's skill in political management as a proof of 
its correctness. Aaron Burr, however, was too knowing a politician 
ever to waste time upon the dozen loafers in each ward of New 
York who alone could then be justly called rabble ; and his skill, 
such as it was, did not prevent his own downfall and hopeless ruin. 
America had no rabble. America has no rabble. Except in a few 
large cities, there is no considerable class that even bears any out- 
ward resemblance to a rabble ; and never has that class been impor- 
tant in a general election. The voters that kept the Tweeds in 
power were, for the most part, well-meaning, industrious men, whom 
a Tweed could reach through their prejudices, their vanity, and 
their interest, but who could not be reached by honest men because 
education had oj)ened no road to their minds accessible to disinter- 
ested intelligence. But let me recall the leading traits of Mr. Jef- 
ferson's administration, with a view to getting light upon the ques- 
tion, wdiether he satisfied the people of his time by doing right, or 
by adroitly pretending to do right. 

He was faithful to the party that elected him. 

As soon as his election was known, some of his friends urged him 
to conciliate the Federalists by appointing a few of their leaders to 
office. His answer was, IN o : the mass of the party, being Eepubli- 



606 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

can at heart, will be conciliated by a consistent adherence to Eepnb- 
licau principles; and, as to the chiefs, they cannot be conciliated! 
Besides, every office in the country in the gift of the president was 
already filled by a Federalist; for that party, said he, had at an 
early period adopted the principle of "excluding from office every 
shade of opinion that was not theirs ; " and he thought it onl3^ right 
that all vacancies should be given to Republicans, until there should 
be at least as many of them in office as Federalists. He meant, as 
he said early in his first term, to "sink Federalism into an abyss 
from which there should be no resurrection for it." He accom- 
plished this purpose; and his clear adherence both to the men and 
principles of his own party was among the means which he employed. 

But he would not appoint men to office merely because they were, 
con.spicuous partisans. 

The notorious Callender was a case in point. He was a scurrilous, 
fertile, forcible writer of the day, who had been px-osecuted under 
the Sedition Law, and so made a dirty martyr of. Republicans had 
been compelled to give him aid and comfort in his distress, because 
he was the victim of a law they abhorred. Upon the triumph of 
the Republican party, he came to Jefferson, asking as a reward for 
party services the Richmond post-office, worth fifteen hundred dol- 
lars a year. Jefferson relieved his necessities with money, but 
refused him' the place, simply because he was unfit for it, and thus 
gained one of the most implacable and indecent vituperators a pub- 
lic servant ever had. George Rogers Clarke, too, a hero whom he 
revered, he often longed to employ, as the most skilful manager of 
all Indian affairs the country possessed. But he did not. The 
reason was, Whiskey. He gave General Clarke's brother a commis- 
sion and an appointment; but not the man who had aided to give 
his country . libert}'^, only to become himself a slave. Nor did 
Thomas Paine realize his joke of shocking the bishops and old ladies 
of the English court bj'^ going as secretary of legation to London. 
Jefferson gave him a safe passage home in a man-of-war, received 
him with honor at the White House, with cordiality at Monticello, 
and exchanged philosophic news with him; but did not send him 
to do what he could not do, — represent a clean, sober, orderly peo- 
ple in a foreign land. And when it became apparent that Chancel- 
lor Livingston's growing deafness rendered him an inefficient 
minister at the court of Napoleon, Jefferson risked losing the sup- 



JEFFEESON PRESIDENT. . 607 

port of the State of Xew York, first, bj sending Monroe to help 
him, and afterwards b}^ recalling him. But the most remarlcable 
case was that of John Randolph, the sharp-tongued leader of the 
Republican party in the House of Representatives. He was^ sug- 
gested by a friend for the English mission. Mr. Jeiferson was silent. 
Mr. Madison also waived the subject. Then the friend pressed his 
claims, and other members of the House added solicitations. The 
president withheld the appointment. John Randolph went into 
opposition, in which his single small talent shone like a thin, keen 
rapier in the sun. The only objection to his appointment was, that 
he was ludicrously unfit for a post requiring patience, prudence, 
self-control, industry, and address. 

Jefferson took great care to get the right man for the right place. 

In fact, a ruler of men, whether he is a private or a public person, 
has but two duties to perform, — to select the right assistants, and 
to treat them so as to get out of them the best service they have in 
them. That is the whole art of governing, and Jefferson knew it. 
"There is nothing," he wrote to a friend in May, 1801, ''I am so 
anxious about as making the best possible appointments." But 
how difficult the task in a country so extensive as the United States, 
where personal knowledge is impossible ! His chief reliance seems 
to have been upon the unsolicited recommendation of men in whom 
he had confidence. Thus, he wrote to ISTathaniel Macon of North 
Carolina very early in his first year: "In all cases when an office 
becomes vacant in your State, I shall be much obliged to you to 
recommend the best characters." Jefferson was curiously happy in 
his appointments; and the reason was, that he never slighted this 
chief duty, and was, from the first, on his guard against the recom- 
mendations of thoughtless, unprincipled good-nature. He would 
have made more successes of this kind even than he did, but for the 
inadequate compensation attached to the most important posts ; 
which limits a president's choice to a few individuals exceptionally 
circumstanced. Many of his letters offering appointments show 
how much he lamented his inability to offer "due remuneration." 

He would not give an appointment to a relative. 

At the first view, this seems unjust to the honorable and capable 
families who were related to the president. It has the air of court- 
ing cheap and easy popularitj', and it is open to the objection of 
pitching the note too high for the limited range of human nature. 



608 UFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

But his convictions on the point were clear and strong; and Profes- 
sor Tucker records that he acted on this principle throughout life in 
the administration of trusts. Thus, as rector of the University of 
Virginia, he opposed the appointment of a nephew to a professor- 
ship, though he was well qualified for the place; dreading lest it 
should open a door to the system which has made universities and 
church endowments in other lands mere appendages to the estates 
of governing families. He was nobly seconded in his resolution by 
bis own kindred. Imagine his delight on receiving from one of 
them, George Jefferson, a few days after his inauguration, a letter 
spontaneously declining to be a candidate for a Federal office to 
which his neighbors and friends desired to recommend him. ''The 
public," wrote the president, "will never be made to believe that an 
appointment of a relative is made on the ground of merit alone, 
uninfluenced by family views ; nor can they ever see with approba- 
tion ofl&ces, the disposal of which they intrust to their presidents for 
public purposes, divided out as family property." He owned that 
the rule bore hardly upon a president's relations ; but the public 
good, he thought, required the sacrifice, for which their share in the 
public esteem might be considered some compensation. "I could 
not be satisfied," said he, " until I assured j-ou of the increased 
esteem with which this transaction fills me for you." 

His two sons-in-law did not suffer from the rule, since their neigh- 
bors kept them both in the House of Representatives. Here, again, 
the president showed his nice regard for the mental integrity of 
others. In his intercourse with these gentlemen, it was a thing 
understood between them, that measures pending in their House 
were not to be a topic of conversation ; and if, by chance, conversa- 
tion took that turn, "I carefully avoid," says Jefferson, "expressing 
an opinion on them in their presence, that we may all be at our 
ease." The rule, happily, did not exclude friends; and he thus had 
the pleasure of appointing to the place of commissioner of loans at 
E-ichmond the beloved comrade of his youth, John Page. 

But he would not exempt friends from the operation of a good 
rule. 

It was an old opinion of his, which now became a rule of his 
administration, that a foreign minister should not remain abroad 
more than seven or eight years. He drew this opinion from his own 
experience. " When I returned from France," he once explained, 



JEFFEESON PRESIDENT. 609 

"after an absence of six or seven years, I was astonished at the 
change which I founrl had taken place in the United States in that 
time. No more like the same people : their notions, their habits 
and manners, the course of their commerce, so totally changed, that 
I, who stood in those of 1784, found myself not at all qnalified to 
speak of their sentiments, or forward their views, in 1790." Hence 
the rule. But it excluded from the public service two of liis oldest 
friends, David Humphreys and William Short, both of whom had 
served under him as secretary of legation before attiiining the rank 
of plenipotentiary which they then held. Humphreys had been 
absent from home eleven years, and Short seventeen years. One of 
Jefferson's first acts was to recall Humphrej^s; which he soon fol- 
lowed by declining to transfer Short to Paris, where he felt the need 
of just such a tried and vigilant minister. "Your appointment," he 
wrote to Mr. Short, " was impossible a/ter an absence of seventeen 
years. Under any other circumstances, I should never fail to give 
to 3'ourself and the world proofs of my friendship for you and of my 
confidence in j'ou." 

He turned no man out of office because he was opposed to him in 
politics. 

And yet he did, during the first two years of his first terra, 
remove twenty-six Federalists, and appoint Kepublicans in their 
stead. After that, there were scarcely any removals ; and Republi- 
cans were only appointed to vacancies created by death or resigna- 
tion. And now with regard to those twenty-six. The result of the 
presidential election of 1800 was known in Washington on the 12th 
of December, a little less than three months before the end of Mr. 
Adams's term. During that interval some valuable life-offices fell 
vacant, twenty-four judgeships were created, and several places held 
during the president's pleasure were vacated. Mr. Adams hastened 
to fill these offices, from that of chief justice of the Supreme Court 
to postmaster, leaving not one of them to his successor. Such was 
the primitive condition of the political mind in 1801, that Republi- 
cans regarded tliis conduct as the last degree of indecenc}^, and 
Jefferson shared the feeling. Indeed, for so placid and placable a 
gentleman, he was highly indignant; and two or three years passed 
before he could "heartily forgive" his old friend Adams for yielding, 
in so unworthy a manner, to the "pressure" of his partisans. He 
resolved not to regard those appointments; which, he said, Mr. 

89 



610 LIFE OF TH0]V1AS JEFFEESON. 

Adams knew lie was not making for liimself, but for a successor. 
"Tin's outrage on decency," he wrote to his okl colleague, General 
Knox, who had written to congratulate him on his election, "should 
not have its effect except in the life-appointments, which are irremo- 
vable ; but, as to the others, I consider the nominations as nullities, 
and will not view the persons appointed as even candidates for their 
office, much less as possessing it by any title meriting respect." 
These offices were sixteen in number. Their incumbents v»ere all 
removed during the first year, and Kepublicans appointed to fill 
them. The other ten removals, most of which occurred in the 
second year, were for three causes: 1, Official misconduct; 2, "Ac- 
tive and bitter opposition " (to use the president's own words) "to 
the order of things which the public will has established." There 
was a third reason for removal, which the president thus explained: 
"The courts being so decidedly Federal and irremovable, it is 
believed that Republican attornej's and marshals, being the doors of 
entrance into the courts, are indispensably necessary as a shield to 
the Republican part of our fellow-citizens, which, I believe, is the 
main body of the people." Accordingly, although the expiration 
of the Alien and Sedition Laws rendered the Federal courts less 
dangerous to freedom than they had been, four or five of these 
officials were removed. 

Tlie outcry caused by this moderate exercise of the president's 
power cannot be imagined by readers of the present day. Jefferson, 
indeed, stood between two fires, — the Federalists shrieking with 
most vigorous unanimity as each head dropped into the basket; and 
the Republican host muttering remonstrance that the decapitating 
instrument worked so slowly. The denunciation of the Federalists 
he could not avoid ; but he showed much tact in reconciling his own 
partisans to this moderate course. To mere partisans, he would show 
how much better it was to have an able Federalist passive and 
acquiescent in office, and all hia circle of friends quiet for his sake, 
than, by turning him out of office, to convert him and his family 
into vigilant, imbittered opponents. To men, who, like himself, 
desired to see the whole body of citizens restored to good humor, his 
appeal was to their sense of the just and the becoming. The Tam- 
many Society of Baltimore deputed a 3'oung member, who was going 
t6 Monticello, to make known to the president the discontent of the 
society al seeing so many Federalists still in office. The following 
conversation is reported by the deputy : — 



' JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 611 

President. I should be very glad to gratify my friends in Balti- 
more by turning the Federalists out of ofSce, and filling their places 
with men of my own part3^ But there is an obstacle in the way 
wliich I cannot remove, — a question which I have not been able to 
solve. Perhaps you can do this for me. 

Young Tammany. I despair of solving any problem that puzzles 
Mr. Jefterson, but I desire to hear what it is. 

President. Well, sir, we are Republicans, and we are contending 
for the extension of the right of suffrage. Is it not so ? 

Young Tammant. Yes, sir. 

President (who had not read his Plato for nothing). We would 
not, therefore, put any restraint upon the right of suffrage as it 
already exists ? 

Young Tammany (unwarned by the fate of those who sought 
wisdom from Socrates). By no means, sir. 

President. Tell me, then, what is the diiference between deny- 
ing the right of suffrage, and punishing a man for exercising it by 
turning him out of office ? 

The deputy could not answer this question. "I had to leave him 
where I found him," he used to say in telling the stor3\ The presi- 
dent held firmly to his course, xinmoved by the execrations of 
Federalists and the remonstrances of Republicans. At a moment 
in his second year, when the opposition was vituperative beyond all 
previous experience, he wrote to a member of his cabinet : " I still 
think our original idea as to office is best ; that is, to depend for the 
obtaining a just participation on deaths, resignations, and delin- 
quencies. This will least effect the tranquillity of the people, and 
prevent their giving in to the suggestion of our enemies, that ours 
has been a contest for office, not for principle." I wish he could 
have gone one step farther, and admitted the right of every office- 
holder to pass his leisure hours exactly as he chose. I wish he had 
not added: "To these means of obtaining a just share in the trans- 
action of the public business shall be added one other, to wit, • 
removal for electioneering activity, or open and industrious opposi- 
tion to the principles of the present government, legislative and 
executive. Every officer of the government may vote at elections 
according to his conscience ; but we should betray the cause com- 
mitted to our care were we to permit the influence of official patron- 



612 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOJST. 

age to be used to overthrow that cause." We must always heware 
of demanding too mucli of liaman nature. But I luish he could 
have said, "Rail on, Federalist postmasters and Hamiltonian col- 
lectors ! Mount the stump ! Berate the administration ! You are 
not my servants, nor the administration's servants, but the servants 
of the people. It is only my concern to see that 3'ou do faithfully 
the duty of your places. After office-hoiu"s, 3'ou differ in no respect 
from citizens engaged in the ordinary pursuits of private life." It 
is easy to be wise for other people; nor have we a victorious party 
at our back to make wisdom difficult ; and who could have foreseen 
such an abuse of the precedent as infuriate Jackson made in 1829? 
No man. 

Jefferson reduced the patronage of the government to the mini- 
mum. 

The strongest organization on earth is, as we all know, the Boman 
Catholic Church. Viewed merely as an organization, it has but one 
defect, — there is no provision in itself for limiting its expansion, 
and preventing its becoming an insupportable burden. And this 
grievous fault belongs to all the ancient governments, whether eccle- 
siastical or secular. When Louis XIV. passed a few weeks at 
Versailles, accommodation had to be provided in the palace for three 
thousand persons ; audi have myself jjossessed an octavo volume 
of four hundred pages which was filled with the mere catalogue of 
the servants of George III., stating only their titles, duties, and 
salaries. Burke's Reform Bill abolished six hundred court offices, 
without making a gap in the mighty host large enough to attract 
the notice of a disinterested public. Nobody appears to have missed 
any of them. This tendency of governments to become excessive 
is so strong, constant, and insidious, that no head of a government 
will ever resist it unless the ambition that controls him is something 
nobler than personal. Jefferson was one of those who gave this best 
proof of a disinterested love of right j^riuciples. Every office in 
his control that was not necessary was suppressed ; and the whole 
apparatus of government — military, naval, judicial, executive — was 
reduced in quantity. We might sum up his policy in this particular 
in a sentence : The men you do employ, pay adequately ; make it 
worth the ablest men's while to serve the government, but employ 
no two men to do one man's work. 

Thus, while no branch of the public service was increased in cost 



JEFFERSOK PRESIDENT. 613 

or in importance, most departments were diminished. Mr. Gallatin 
co-operated heartily with the president in reducing the extensive 
corps of ofificials which Colonel Hamilton had created. In 1802 
the office of commissioner of internal revenue and that of super- 
intendent of stamps were suppressed ; which only whetted the 
president's appetite for further reductions. " It remains," he wrote 
to Gallatin, " to amalgamate the comptroller and auditor into one, and 
reduce the register to a clerk of accounts ; and then the organization 
will consist, as it should at first, of a keeper of money, a keeper of 
accounts, and the head of the department." Details do not concern 
us now: it is the spirit of the administration which I desire to 
exhibit. "Let us deserve well of our country," he concluded, "by 
making her interests the end of all our plans, and not our pomp, 
patronage, and irresponsibility." It is this disinterested spirit, 
which shines from all the documents, the correspondence, the hasty 
notes, of the president and his cabinet, that renders the administra- 
tion of Jefferson so remarkable. Bitter John Randolph conceded 
this merit to Jefferson. "I have never seen," said he in 1828, "but 
one administration, which, seriouslj' and in good faith, was disposed 
to give up its patronage, and was willing to go farther than Con- 
gress, or even the people themselves, so far as Congress represents 
their feelings, desired ; and that was the first administration of 
Thomas Jefferson. He, sir, was the only man I knew, or ever heard 
of, who reallj'', truly, and honestly, not only said, Nolo ejjiscojyari, 
but actually refused the mitre." 

He endeavored to simplify the apparatus and the operations of 
government, so that the rural member of Congress and his constitu- 
ents might understand them. 

His heart was much set on this, particularly in the finances, 
which, he thought, Hamilton had purposely complicated. What we 
can now all see was merely a defect of Hamilton's mind (or the 
inevitable failure of a third-rate man in a first-rate place), Jefferson, 
stung by his calumnious vituperation, and alarmed at the pernicious 
tendency* of his influence, regarded as intentional mystification. 
He thought, that Hamilton began by puzzling the president and 
Congress, and ended by getting the finances into such a snarl that 
he could not "unravel" them himself. Thus he explained his 
meaning to Mr. Gallatin : "Hamilton gave to the debt, in the first 
instance, ir funding it, the most artificial and mysterious form he 



614 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIfr. 

could devise. He then moulded up his appropriations of a number 
of scraps and fragments, many of wliich were nothing at all, and 
applied them to different objects in reversion and remainder, until 
the whole system was involved in an impeneti-able fog; and, while he 
was giving himself the airs of providing for the payment of the 
debt, he left himself free to add to it continually, as he did, in fact, 
instead of paying it." Jefferson's idea was to let the money re- 
ceived into the treasury form one mass, from which all pnj'ments 
should be made, only giving precedence to such claims as involved 
the honor of the nation : that is, reserve, first, the interest of the 
public debt; next, any portion of the principal of the debt due 
within the year ; then pay the expenses of the year; and finally, if 
there is any money left, discharge part of the debt payable at 
pleasure. This was his idea, which he desired the secretary to 
"approach by every tack which previous arrangements force upon 
us ; " until the finances should be " as clear and intelligible as a 
merchant's books ; so that every member of Congress, and every man 
of any mind in the Union, should be able to comprehend them, to 
investigate abuses, and consequently to control them." 

He abolished court etiquette, and every usage that resembled it. 

Any one who passed an hour at the head-quarters of a command- 
ing general during the late war had an opportunity of discovering 
that court etiquette originated in necessity. So many people desire 
access to the officer in command of a large force in active service, 
that unless he is hedged about by rules, usages, sentinels, aides-de- . 
camp, he would, not merely be useless as an officer, but he would 
soon be destroyed. Kingship began in generalship. The king was 
once the ablest man in defending his people, who were alwaj^s men- 
aced by other barbarians. The first time an ancient border chief 
told one of his tribe to answer questions for him while he devoured 
his dinner, or persuaded two or three to stand guard over him with 
their clubs while he caught an hour's sleep between two fights, court 
etiquette began. It was the invention of "Divine Right," that 
exaggerated the necessary regulations of a camp into a f^'stera of 
adulation and semi-worship. How absurd, how oppressive, how 
impious, how ridiculous, it had become in the last century, we can 
still partly see by the relics of it that remain. We know how it 
"riled" the generous mind of Thackeray (who was no democrat) to 
see Prince Albert attended in shooting by a gentleman-equerry to 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 615 

hand the prince his gun, when it had been loaded by a servant, and 
give it back to the servant after it had been discharged. This trifle 
represents the system which was founded on the assumption that 
the king, and the class whoin the king honored, were of an essence 
or blood superior to others, as the Brahmin is supposed to be 
innately and eternally superior to the pariah. It all grew out of the 
theory, that the king is the divinely designated master. Jefferson 
regarded himself as the chosen servant of the people of his country, 
entitled, if he was faithful to his trust, to the honor due from 
all the worthy to all the worthy, and to no more. His person, his 
time, his house, could justly claim the protection which is the right 
and necessity of all men engaged in affairs numerous and important, 
and no more. 

Accordingly the weekly levee was at once abolished. On two 
days in the j-ear, the 4th of July and the 1st of January, when 
houses and hearts are usually open in the United States, he opened 
his to all who chose to visit him. On other days he was accessible 
to visitors on the terms and conditions which his duties imposed : 
all were welcome who had claims upon his attention or regard, 
except so far as the superior claim of the whole people restricted him. 
Some of the Federalists in WaslTington, we are told, hit upon an 
expedient to balk the president's intention of abolishing the levee. 
On the usual day, at the usual hour, — two in the afternoon, — 
ladies and gentlemen began to arrive at the president's house, 
attired in the manner customarj- at the levees. Tbe president was 
not at home. He was enjoying his regular two hours' ride on 
horseback, which nothing but absolute necessity could make him 
forego. When he returned at three o'clock, and learned that the 
great rooms were filled with company waiting to see him, he guessed 
their object, and frustrated it gracefully, and with perfect good- 
humor, by merely going among them, all accoutred as he was, 
booted, s^mrred, splashed with mud, riding-whip in hand, and 
greeting them as though the conjunction of so many guests were 
merely .a joyous coincidence. They, in their turn, caught the spirit 
of the joke, and the aflair ended happily. But it was the last of 
the levees. 

In the great matter of dinners, he adopted, or rather he continued, 
the style of Old Virginia, wliich proved to be to him a grievous, if 
not a ruinous burden, as it had been to many a wealthier planter. 



616 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

The Virginia style was simply : Come one, comti all, come again, 
keep coming, and bring your friends. In President Washington's 
time, the business of entertaining members of Congress, officers of the 
government, and distinguished strangers, had been assumed by the 
four members of the cabinet; and it became so oppressive, Jefferson 
tells us, that "it was among the motives for their retirement." 
Their successors, he adds, profited by the experiment, and lived 
altogether as private individuals, leaving to the president the whole 
burden of that representative hospitality supposed then to be incum- 
bent upon the head of a government. In Washington, too, the 
president was then the only man who had a house large enough for 
the entertainment of a dozen people at dinner, or fifty persons in 
the evening; and lieuce there could be little social life in the place, 
unless the president kept open house. Shut out from all tlie world, 
ill-lodged and ill-attended, the circle of officials, the foreign legations, 
and members of Congress, could only meet in an agreeable manner at 
the president's mansion. To the last year of Jefferson's second term, 
Washington was still only a spoiled wilderness. Francis Jackson, 
the English plenipotentiary, described it, in 1809, as more resem- 
bling Hampstead Heath than anv place he had ever seen ; consisting 
of scattered houses, intersected \^th heath, forest, and gravel-pits. 
He declares .that he started a covey of partridges " about three 
hundred yards from the House of Congress." In such circum- 
stances, what could a hospitable Virginian do but convert his 
residence into a general rendezvous and free club ? 

All would have gone well but for the dinners, to which the salary 
was fatally inadequate. We get an insiglit into the way of life at 
the White House from the recollections of Edmund Bacon of Ken- 
tucky (Jefferson at Monticello, p. 113), who was, for twenty years, 
Mr. Jefferson's manager. He visited ^Vashington several times, and 
always lived at the White House during his stay, dining daily at the 
president's table. There were eleven servants in the house from 
Monticello, he tells us, besides a French cook, a French steward, and 
an Irish coachman. " When I was there," Mr. Bacon reports, " the 
president's house was surrounded by a high rock wall, and there was 
an iron gate immediately in front of it, and from that gate to the 
Capitol the street was just as straight as a gun-barrel. Nearly all 
the houses were on that street." This is Mr. Bacon's recollection 
of the dinners : — 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. • 617 

*'Mr. Jefferson often told me that the office of vice-pi-esident was 
far preferable to that of president. He was perfectly tired out with 
company. He had a very long dining-room, and his table was chock- 
full every one of the sixteen days I was there. There were Con- 
gressmen, foreigners, and all sorts of people, to dine with him. He 
dined at four o'clock, and they generally sat and talked until night. 
It used to worry me to sit so long; and I finally quit when I got 
through eating, and went off and left them. The first thing in the 
morning there was to go to market. Mr. Jefferson's steward was a 
very smart man, well educated, and as much of a gentleman in his 
appearance as any man. His carriage-driver would get out the 
wagon early in the morning, and Lamar would go with him to 
Georgetown to market. I have all mj' life been in tlie habit of get- 
ting up about four o'clock in tlie morning, and I went with them 
very often. Lamar told me that it often took fifty dollars to pay for 
what marketing they would use in a day." 

At these dinners, which so wearied the soul of Mr. Bacon, there 
was no etiquette except that which would have been observed at the 
table of any private person of the time. Mr. Jefferson, however, as 
his friend Professor Tucker, reports, was well aware of the sensi- 
tiveness of self-love, and was most careful never to wound it. At 
his more public dinners, if he found that he could not recall the 
name of a member of Congress who was present, he would give a 
sign to his secretary to go into the next room, where the president 
would join him to get the information desired. 

Tlie sjrstem of precedence was abolished. 

This was settled at a cabinet meeting early in the first term, whtin 
the whole barbarous code of precedence was swept awaj". These 
Eules were substituted : 1. Kesidents to pay the first visit to stran- 
gers ; and among strangers, whether native or foreign, first comers call 
first upon later comers. To this rule tliere was allowed one exception : 
'•'Foreign ministers, from the necessity of making themselves known, 
pay the first visit to the secretary of state, which is returned." 
2. "When brought together in society, all are perfectly equal, 
whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office." 
The president amplified these rules thus : " The families of foreign, 
ministers, arriving at the seat of government, receive the first visit 
from those of the national ministers, as from all other residents. 



618 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESO]Sr. 

Members of the legislature and of the judiciary, independent of 
their offices, have a riglit as strangers to receive the first visit. No 
title being admitted here, those of foreigners give no precedence. 
Difference of grade among the diplomatic members gives no prece- 
dence. At public ceremonies to which the government invites the 
presence of foreign ministers and their families, a convenient seat 'or 
station will be provided for them, with any other strangers invited, 
and the families of the national ministers, each talcing place as they 
arrive, and without any precedence. To maintain the principle of 
equality, or of pele mele, and prevent the growth of precedence out 
of courtesy, the members of the executive will practise at their own 
houses, and recommend an adherence to, the ancient usages of the 
country, of gentlemen in mass giving precedence to the ladies in 
mass, in passing from one apartment where they are assembled into 
another." 

All this, with the friendly, humane usages that grew out of it, or 
were akin to it, agreeable as it was to most persons, shocked some 
ladies, and offended all men who owed their importance solely to 
rank or office. Mr. Jackson, English minister in 1809, being a 
gentleman of sense and good-humor, was amused and pleased, dur- 
his first conference with President Madison (which proved to be very 
long), when a " negro servant brought in some glasses of punch and 
a seed-cake," just as might have been done in a farm-house of the 
day; but his wife lamented that her husband, after having been 
accustomed "to treat with the civilized governments of Europe," 
should liave to negotiate with the "savage democrats" of America. 
It so chanced that the British minister from 1803 to 1809, with 
whom Jefferson had most to do, Merry by name but not bj^ nature, 
was a fanatic of etiquette ; and it appears, that, previous to his pres- 
entation to the president, he had not heard of the business-like manner 
in which the affairs of the White House were conducted. He was 
stunned at the manner of his reception. It- made an impression 
upon his mind which neither explanation nor the lapse of years could 
even soften, much less obliterate. And, really, when we consider 
that he had passed his life at courts where the nod, the smile, the 
frown, the glance, the tone, the silence, the presence, the absence, 
of the head of the government, were matters of importance, to be 
noted, recorded, transmitted, and weighed, we ought not to laugh at 
this Mr. Merry as we do. Besides, as Mr. Jefferson remarks, "Poor 



JEFFEESON PKESIDENT. G19 

Merry had learned nothing of diplomacy but its suspicions, without 
head enough to distinguish when they were misplaced." Nevertlieless, 
he comes down to us borne on a billow of laughter, and he remains to 
this day one of the stock-jests of Washington. Thus he recounted 
his woes, three years after the event, to Mr. Josiah Quincy of Massa- 
chusetts, the ablest Federalist in Congress and one of the 
worthiest : — 

"I called on Mr. Madison, who accompanied me officially to intro- 
duce me to the president. We went together to the mansion-house* 
I being in full official costume, as the etiquette of my place required 
on such a formal introduction of a minister from Great Britain to the 
president of the United States. On arriving at the hall of audi- 
ence, we found it empty ; at which Mr. Madison seemed surprised, 
and proceeded to an entry leading to the president's study. I fol- 
lowed him, supposing the introduction was to take place in the ad- 
joining room. At this moment Mr. Jefferson entered the entry at 
the other end, and all three of us were packed in this narrow space, 
from which, to make room, I was obliged to back out. In this awk- 
ward position my introduction to the president was made by Mr. 
Madison. Mr. Jefferson's appearance soon explained to me that the 
general circumstances of my reception had not been accidental, but 
studied. I, in my official costume, found myself at the hour of 
reception he had himself appointed, introduced to a man as president 
of the United States, not merely in an undress, but actually 
STANDING IN SLIPPERS DOWN AT THE HEELS, and both pautaloons, 
coat, and under-clothes indicative of utter slovenliness and indiffer- 
ence to appearances, and in a state of negligence actually studied. I 
could not doubt that the whole scene was prepared and intended as 
an insult, not to me personally, but to the sovereign I represented." 

It is just possible that Mr. Jefferson thought, that morning, of 
the time when Gouverneur Morris kicked his heels four months in 
London waiting for the promised answer of the British government 
to as reasonable and urgent a communication from President Wash- 
ington as one government ever made to another, and then had to 
leave England without getting it. Possibly, also, it did happen to 
occur to his memory, that Mr. Adams had been kept vainly waiting 
three years in England for a reply to the same proposals. Perhaps, 
too, he remembered the period when he was himself presented to 



620 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the king of England by Mr. Adams, and the king froze to them 
both; an example which was followed by the "king's friends," and 
society generally, so that it required courage for a courtier to show 
them any thing more than cold civility at an evening party. And 
this, while they were only asking the king to stay the bloody 
ravages of the Indians by giving up the seven posts within the 
boundaries of their country. He may, too, have thought of the 
time when he, as secretary of state, would send an important com- 
munication to the British minister at Philadelphia, and wait many 
months for an answer; but if he failed to answer a letter within 
three or four days, he would be "goaded" by a second. Perhaps 
he thought the time had come to show the Federalists that he did 
not accept Great Britain at her own valuation, and did not believe 
she was fighting the battle of man and liberty against Bonaparte. 
It may be, too, that he, knowing the childish politics of Europe, and 
what ridiculous importance was attached there to trifles, may have 
paused before ringing for a pair of shoes not down at the heels, and 
wondered if his old slippers, duly reported to Bonaparte, miglit not 
drive another nail into the bargain for Louisiana, just concluded 
by Mr. Livingston and Mr. Monroe, to the great joy of president 
and people. All these thoughts niaij have flitted through the presi- 
dent's mind, and held back his hand from the bell-rope ; but, in all 
probability, he had no thoughts of the kind, and only wore the 
clothes he usually did while at work. 

A few weeks after arrived in Washington the young Irish poet, 
Thomas Moore, who had crossed the Atlantic in the same ship with 
Mr. and INIrs. Merry. To him, also, the affronted Briton related 
his sorrows, and even exhibited the president clad in the same 
style. Mr. Merry presented Mr. Moore to the president at the 
White House. " I found him," the poet records, "sitting with Gen- 
eral Dearborn, and one or two other officers, and in the same homely 
costume, comprising slippers and Connemara stockings, in which 
Mr. Merry had been received by him, much to that formal minister's 
horror, when waiting on him in full dress to deliver his credentials. 
My single interview with this remarkable person was of very short 
duration ; but to have seen and spoken to the man who drew up the 
Declaration of Independence was an event not to be forgotten." 
The poet did not ap[)rove of the president, and said so in several 
sa/tirical stanzas and poems in his next publication ; at which Mr. 



JEFFEESON PRESIDENT. ' 621 

Jefferson was amnsed and even surprised, for he had not before heard 
of this new light in literature. Mr. Randall relates a pleasing inci- 
dent to show how little he had come to regard the stings and arrows 
of outrageous politics. A few years after his retirement, a grand- 
daughter placed in his hands Moore's Irish Melodies, as the book of 
the season, which was having a great run on both sides of the ocean. 
The young lady, curious and expectant, watched him as he opened 
the work and turned over the leaves. Said Jefferson, " This is the 
little man who satirized me so." Reading on, he was won by the 
flowing music and patriotic feeling of the verse. '•' Why" he said at 
length, " he is a poet after all ; " and ever after, even to the end of 
his life, he was fond of reading certain favorites among the poems 
of Thomas Moore. 

But poor Merry's troubles were not yet at an end. He and his 
wife dined one day at the White House ; and, when dinner was 
announced, the president offered his arm to the lady nearest him at 
the moment, Mrs. Madison — not to Mrs. Merry, who was on the 
other side of the room ! Insult upon insult! " Poor Merry " made 
such an outcry at this in Washington, that Mr. Madison deemed it 
best to explain the circumstances to Monroe, the American minis- 
ter in London, that he miglit be prepared to meet Meurj^'s version. 
Mr. Merry did relate his grievances to the English minister for 
Foreign Affairs ; who, however, forbore to mention it to Monroe. 
If he had, Monroe was ready for him ; for, besides being fully alive 
to the humor of the aff;xir, he liad seen, a few weeks before, in an 
official London drawing-room, the wife of an under-secretary of 
state accorded pj-ecedence over his own. Mrs. Merry went no more 
to tlie White House, and her husband only went when official duty 
compelled. But nothing could tire the placable good-nature of 
Jefferson. Some time after, desirous to restore social intercourse, 
he caused Mr Merry to be informally asked whether he and his 
wife would accept an invitation to a family dinner at the president's 
house ; and receiving, as he understood, an affirmative intimation, 
Mr. Jefferson sent the invitation, written with his own hand. 
Merry rose to his opportunity. He wrote to the secretary of 
state, asking whether the president of the United States had 
invited him as a private gentleman or as British plenipotentiary; 
for, if as a private gentleman, he must obtain the king's permission 
before he could accept j if in his official character, he must have an 



622 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

assurance that he would be treated with the respect due to it. 
Madison, with short civility, waived the solution of this problem,' 
and the matter dropped. But it was not till 1809 that British inter- 
ests in America were confided to abler hands. 

Some other points of public etiquette were now settled on rational 
principles once and forever. The fussy incompetents recently in 
power had been concerned to know the relation which the f)resident 
sustained to the governors of States, — precisely how much more 
exalted a president was than a governor, the exact degi-ee of defer- 
ence a governor should show a president, and the forms in wliich 
deference should be expressed. In July, 1801, the governor of 
Virginia asked the president to indicate the etiquette which he 
thought should regulate the communications between the Sljate gov- 
ernments and the general government. His reply in substance was: 
Let there be 7w special etiquette. Between president and governor, 
each being the supreme head of an independent government, no 
difference of rank can be admitted. Thej" are equals. Let us con- 
tinue then, as in General Washington's time, to write freely, just 
as public business requires, and with no more ceremon}'- than obvious 
propriety and convenience dictate. " If it be possible," he said, " to 
be certainly conscious of any thing, I am conscious of feeling no 
diiFerence between writing to the highest and lowest being on 
earth." 

The two miles of tenacious yellow mud that lay " straight as a 
gun-barrel " between the White House and the Capitol assisted to 
reconcile all but the extreme Federalists to a change in the mode 
of intercourse between the president and Congress.^ Hitherto the 
president had opened Congress by a speech, framed on the model 
of a king of England's speech, and delivered it to both Houses assem- 
bled in the Senate Chamber. He had been wont to ride to and from 
the Capitol in a coach and six, which was followed by coaches and 
four bearing members of the government and others, the whole form- 
ing a considerable procession. When the president had retired, the 
Houses separated, and each appointed a committee to prepare an 
address in reply. Of late years these addresses had furnished the 
pretext for long and impassioned debates on party politics, lasting 
one, two, and even three weeks, the minority always striving to 
reduce the eulog}'' of the address to the minimum. When, after this 
desperate struggle, an address had been agreed upon, the House 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 623 

voting it rode in such state as members could command to the abode 
of the president, and stood around him in a solemn semicircle, while 
one of their number read to him what he had already read fifty times 
for himself, besides fifty columns of debate upon it. Then the pres- 
ident read a short, formal acknowledgment of the address, after 
which the members returned to their chamber, and began the busi- 
ness of the session. 

Federalist gentlemen discovered, on the morning of December 8, 
1801, that this fine opportunity for oratorical display and partisan 
recrimination was not to be afforded them. Scene : the Senate 
Chamber; the chairman in his revolving chair; members in their 
seats. Enter a young gentleman, Meriwether Lewis perhaps, pri- 
vate secretary to the president, bearing a mass of documents, and a 
note from the president to the vice-president: — 

" Sir, — The circumstances under which we find ourselves at this 
place rendering inconvenient the mode heretofore practised, of 
making by personal address the first communications between the 
legislative and executive branches, I have adopted that by message, 
as used on all subsequent occasions tbrough the session. In doing 
this, I have had principal regard to the convenience of the legisla- 
ture, to the economy of their time, to their relief from the embarrass- 
ment of immediate answers on subjects not yet fully before them, 
and to the benefits thence resulting to the public affairs. Trusting 
that a procedure founded on these motives will meet their approba- 
tion, I beg leave through you, sir, to communicate the enclosed copy, 
with the documents accompanying it, to the honorable the Senate, 
and pray you to accept for yourself and them the homage of my 
high regard and consideration." 

Thus the present usage was established, to the great content of 
all rational beings. He was himself well pleased with the first 
results of the experiment. " Our winter campaign," he wrote to Dr. 
Rush, "has opened with more good-humor than I expected. By 
sending a message, instead of making a speech, at the opening of 
the session, I have prevented the bloody conflict to which the 
making an answer would have committed them." 

Other changes of this nature were these : He discontinued the 
practice of assigning a frigate for the conveyance of ministers across 



624 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

the ocean. He declined to write official letters of condolence to the 
widows or families of deceased officers. He would not have his 
hirtlida}' celebrated by the. usual bulls; and, to prevent this, refused 
to let the date of his birth be communicated. He would not deny 
himself any innocent pleasure, such as attending the races near 
Washington, from any false ideas of official dignity. He refused to 
appoint days of fasting or thanksgiving, on tbe ground that to do 
so would be indirectly to assume an authority over religious exer- 
cises, which the Constitution has expressly forbidden. A recommen- 
dation from the chief magistrate, he thought, would carry with it so 
much authority, that any person or sect disregarding it would suffer 
some degree of odium. "Fasting and prayer," said he, "are reli- 
gious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline." "And 
does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommenda- 
tion less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed?" He 
declined to make any thing resembling an official tour or progress, 
or to receive while travelling attentions directed to his office. To 
secularize and to republicanize the government completehj, remain- 
ing himself a plain American citizen, — these were among the 
objects which he steadily pursued and which he accomplished. 

He was resolved not to be a personage. He would he Thomas 
Jefferson, and nothing else. Pleasing anecdotes are those which 
Mr. llandall relates in illustration of this point, particularly that 
one in which the president figures as the thoughtful and affectionate 
grandfather to his namesake, Thomas Jefferson Kandolph, who 
stopped at Washington a few days on his way to attend the scientific 
lectures at Philadelphia. The president came into his room one 
day, had him unpack his trunk, took pencil and paper, and made a 
list of things he still lacked, saying, "You will need this and this at 
Philadelphia y" and then going about among the stores of Washing- 
ton with the lad, and buying the articles required; finishing the 
performance by asking to see his pocket-book, and handing it back 
to him much better furnished than when he had taken it. That 
story, too, of the j^resident carrying the rough Kentuckian over a 
river on his horse is interesting. This Kentuckian, sitting solitary 
on the bank of a swollen stream, let the gay young men of the pres- 
ident's party all pass on and flounder across the river, without 
making known his desire. Last of all rode the president. Him 
the rough wayfarer addressed, and Mr. Jefferson took him up behind 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 625 

witliout ado. Being asked why lie selected that particular individ- 
ual of the party, the Kentuckian replied, " I reckon a man carries 
Yes or No in his face. The young chaps' faces said, No ; the old 
man's said, Yes." And one day, in his daily ride near Washington, 
the president fell into conversation with a stranger. Politics 
becoming a topic, he had the pleasure of hearing, not only his meas- 
ures roundly denounced, but his character most indecently reviled. 
" Do you know Mr. Jefferson personally ? " he asked. " ISTo, nor do 
I want to." " But is it fair play to believe and repeat such stories, 
and then not dare to meet the subject of them face to face, S,nd trust 
to your own senses?" "I will never shrink from meeting Mr. 
Jefferson if he comes in my way." " Will you go to his house to- 
morrow, and be introduced to him, if I will meet you there?" He 
consented, and Jefferson galloped on. Instantly it occurred to the 
traveller, that it was tlie president himself with whom he had been 
conversing. But he kept his appointment, appearing at the hour, 
attired in his best. "I have called, Mr. Jefferson," said he, "to 
apologize for having said to a stranger" — Here the president, 
laughing, broke in and finished the sentence — "hard things of an 
imaginary personage who is no relation of mine." The stranger 
tried to get in his apology ; but the president laughed it down, 
insisted on his staying to dinner, and made a friend of him and all 
his family. 

He declined to receive presents while in office. 

But he made one exception. In 1806 he received a present of a 
bust of the new Emperor of Kussia, Alexander, with whom he had 
much friendly intercourse during his second term. He thus 
acknowledged the receipt of this work : " I had laid down as a law 
for my conduct while in office, and hitherto scrupulously observed, 
to accept of no present beyond a book, a pamphlet, or other curiosity 
of minor value ; as well to avoid imputation on my motives of action, 
as to shut out a practice susceptible of such abuse. But my partic- 
ular esteem for the character of the Emperor places his image, in 
my mind, above the scope of law. I receive it, therefore, and shall 
cherish it with affection. It nourishes the contemplation of all the 
good placed in his power, and of his disposition to do it." 

An instance of his scrupulousness with regard to deriving per- 
sonal advantage from his office has only lately come to light. A 
private letter of his to General Muhlenberg, collector at Philadel- 
40 



626 LIFE OF TH0MA8 JEFFERSON. 

phia, concerning a purchase of wine, was found, a few years ago, by 
a descendant of that officer, and sent to Mr. Greeley for publication. 
If I were a collector, I would have it printed, framed, and hung up 
in my custom-house. It is dated February 6, 1803 : — 

"Dear Sik, — Mons. d'Yrujo, the Spanish minister here, has been 
so kind as to spare me two hundred bottles of Champagne, part of 
a larger parcel imported for his own use, and consequently privi- 
leged from duty; but it would be improper for me to take the 
benefit of that. I must therefore ask the favor of you to take the 
proper measures for paying the duty ; for which purpose I enclose 
you a bank-check for twenty-two and a half dollars, the amount of 
it. If it could be done without mentioning my name, it would avoid 
ill-intended observations, as in some such way as this^ 'By duty 
paid on a part of such a parcel of wines not entitled to privilege,' 
or in any other way you please. The wine was imported into Phila- 
delphia probably about midsummer last. Accept assurances of my 
great esteem and respect. 

"Th. Jefferson. 
*' General Muhlenberg." 

It would be absurd to praise sucli an act as this, because it was 
simply right. Nor ought it to be within the choice of any public 
officer, of any grade whatever, to do otherwise. It will doubtless, 
before many years have passed, be an impeachable offence for any 
man holding a public office to accept so much as a free ride on a 
horse-car. This is a point that comes home to the suffering sons of 
Manhattan, who remember that a system of plunder which reached 
an average of ten millions a year began in aldermen pocketing bun- 
dles of cigars and quires of note-paper in the old corporation " tea- 
room." 

He used the prestige and the opportunities of his office for the 
public advantage. 

His introduction of better breeds of domestic animals into Vir- 
ginia is a case in point. With the aid of Mr. Livingston, minister 
at Paris, after a long course of manoeuvring and trouble, he man- 
aged to get six merino sheep as far on their way to Albemarle as 
Predericksburg, half for himself, half for Madison, and all for Vir- 
ginia J and wrote to his manager to go with Mr. Madison's head 



JEFFERSON PEESIDENT. 627 

man to get them home. The two managers, when they caught 
sight of these animals, so renowned at the time througliout the 
country, were wofully disappointed. " Tlie sheep were little bits 
of things," reports Mr. Bacon; "and Graves said he would not give 
liis riding-wliip for the whole lot." Their instructions were to 
divide them by tossing up for the first choice. "So," says Mr. 
Bacon, " I put my hand into my pocket, and drew out a dollar, and 
said, 'Head or tail ?' I got the best buck. He was a little fellow, 
but his wool was as fine almost as cotton. When I got home, I put 
a notice in the paper at Charlottesville, that persons who wished to 
improve their stock could send us two ewes, and we would keep them 
until the lambs were old enough to wean, and then give the owners 
the choice of the lambs, and they leave the other lamb and both of 
the ewes. We got the greatest lot of sheep, more than we wanted, — 
two or three hundred, I think ; and in a few years we had an 
immense flock. People came long distances to buy our full-blooded 
sheep. At first we sold them for fifty dollars, but they soon fell to 
thirty and twenty ; and, before I left Mr. Jefferson, merino sheep 
were so numerous, that they sold about as cheap as common ones." 

Next he imported some of the broad-tailed sheep from Barbary, 
which made splendid mutton, but would not thrive in Virginia. He 
introduced also a superior kind of Guinea pigs. Himself, Mr. Madi- 
son, and General Dearborn joined in importing six hogs of a kind 
which Mr. Bacon tells us were called Calcutta hogs ; black and 
white, short-legged, long-bodied, easily kept, and not given to root- 
ing, — a very great success in every respect. "Mr. Jefferson," 
remarks Mr. Bacon, "didn't care about making money from his 
imported stock. His great object was to get it widefy scattered 
over the country, and he left all these arrangements to me. I told 
the people to bring three sows, and when they came for them they 
might take two and leave one. In this way he soon got a large 
number of hogs, and the stock was scattered over that whole 
country." 

His neighbors derived benefit even from his salary, which, to the 
imagination of primitive Virginia, seemed inexhaustible. A larger 
mill was among the urgent wants of the neighborhood, Mr. Bacon 
relates; and the people thought, that, "as Mr. Jefferson had a large 
salary, he was better able to build it than anybody else." He under- 
took the work, since "he was always anxious to benefit the com- 



628 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

munity as much as possible ; " and Mr. Bacon, assisted by an 
engineer from the North, superintended the construction. In bis 
homely, excellent way, the manager relates the hopeful rise of the 
structure, "built of rock," four stories high, witb "four run of 
stone," and a dam and race that cost a thousand dollars ; and he 
tells us what minute directions Mr. Jefferson kept sending from 
Washington about it, and how he preferred it to all tbe works in 
progress on his estate. The mill complete, grain came in, in sur- 
prising quantities, until eleven thousand bushels were stored, await- 
ing their turn to be ground. Coopers, millers, and teamsters were 
all in full activity ; when, alas ! in the midst of a great freshet, Mr. 
Bacon saw the dam swept away by the torrent of waters. " I 
thought we were ruined," he says : " I never felt worse. I did not 
know what we should do." Mr. Jefferson being at home at the 
time. Bacon hurried off to the mountain-top to convey to him the 
dreadful news. There he met the lord of the mansion just from the 
breakfast-table, calm as a May morning. He asked, "Have you 
heard from the river?" "Yes, sir," replied the doleful manager: "I 
have just come from there with very bad news. The mill-dam is 
all swept away." " Well, sir," said Mr. Jefferson, with perfect seren- 
ity of manner, " we can't make a new dam this summer; but we will 
get Lewis's ferry-boat, with our own, and get the hands from all 
the quarters, and boat in rock enough in place of the dam to answer 
for the present; and, next summer, I will send to Baltimore and 
get ship-bolts, and make a dam that the freshet can't wash away." 
Which was done. " You never saw his countenance ruflied," Mr. 
Bacon pbserves. "No odds what happened, it always maintained 
the same expression." 

How eagerly he availed himself of his opportunities for increasing 
the sum of knowledge, his letters exhibit ; and the fact is part of the 
history of that age. It was his thought that sent Meriwether Lewis 
and William Clarke up the Missouri to its sources in the Rocky 
Mountains, across those mountains to the Columbia River, and 
down thve Columbia until huge waves rolling in from the ocean and 
tossing high their light canoes notified them that they had reached 
the Pacific. Counting from the time when Captain John Smith 
sailed up the Chickahominy in search of the South Sea, the world 
had waited two hundred years for this exploration. Never was a 
piece of work of that kind better done or better chronicled ; for it 



JEFFEKSON PRESIDENT. 629 

was Jefferson who selected the two heroes that conducted it. Cap- 
tain Lewis was the son of one of his most valued Albemarle neigh- 
bors. Lieutenant Clarke was th§ brother of tha,t General George 
Edgers Clarke who held back ^lie Indians from joining in the war 
of the Revolution ; and both of them were such masters of all fron- 
tier arts, that the perilous expedition of two years, four months, and 
ten days, was one joj'ous holiday-excursion to them. Returning to 
St. Louis laden with spoils and trophies. Captain Lewis, besides 
his journals and other official results, sends off" exultingly to the 
president "sixty-seven specimens of earths, salts, and minerals, and 
sixty specimens of plants." It was Jefferson, too, who set on foot 
the two exploring expeditions of Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery 
Pike, whose name lives in that of the peak which he discovered, and 
and in those of ten counties of the United States. Pike was the 
first American who explored the Upper Mississippi beyond the Falls 
of St. Anthony; noting the sites of the cities now rising on its 
banks, and shaking hands on the way with "Monsieur Dubuque," 
wlio was working the lead-mines, and lording it over a wide domain. 
Lieutenant Pike was the first American to explore the valley of 
the Arkansas. He said trulj^ in one of his letters, that the regions 
which he had traversed were little more known to the world than 
the wilds in the interior of Africa. In seventj'' years we behold 
them populous, and more familiar to our knowledge than the next 
county. 

It was Jefferson who encouraged Astor to attempt his scheme of 
North-western trade, — a scheme which was as feasible as it was 
audacious, and which only the war of 1812 frustrated. It is inter- 
esting to observe, in view of the present importance of the Western 
silver-mines, that, in 1808, the secret of their existence, " seventeen 
hundred miles from St. Louis," was confided to the president, who, 
however, considering the menacing attitude of Spain, could only 
give verbal encouragement to the exploration sought. He jocularly 
writes to Gallatin : " I enclose for your information the account of a 
silver-mine to fill your treasury." As for the bones of the mam- 
moth, he had enough of them at last, and kept the Philosophical 
Society, of which he was still the president, abundantly supplied 
with objects of curiosity and investigation. And was there ever 
such an indefatigable recorder? Among his papers is a leaf thus 
entitled : " Statement of the vegetable market of Washington during 



630 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

a period of eight years, wherein the earlfest and latest appearance of 
eacli article within the whole eight years is noted." One small page 
suffices, but it is complete : the list embraces thirty-seven articles. 
He could tell at a glance that the earliest appearance of ''sprouts" 
was on the 22d of February, and the latest, May 20 ; and that the 
extremes of the strawberry season were May 8 and July 9. He 
refutes Dickens's satire of red-tape. In a minute or two he could 
put his hand upon any letter or document, any entry or memoran- 
dum, of the tens of thousands whicli he possessed;' and of all this 
myriad mass of details he was the master, not the slave. 

He preserved perfect harmony in his cabinet during the whole of 
botli terms. 

One reason was this : there was not an egotist among them. The 
pugnacious traits, such as vanity, jealousy, personal ambition, and 
the other commonplace forms of self-love, were extinguished, or, at 
least, subordinated in them all. " Our administration," wrote Jef- 
ferson once, " now drawing to a close, I have a sublime pleasure in 
believing will be distinguished as much by having placed itself 
above all the passions which could disturb its harmony as by the 
great operations by which it will have advanced the well-being of 
the nation." All of them were modernized persons. The masters 
of the past were, of necessity, soldiers and men of the soldierly 
spirit. The masters of our modern world are educated men of busi- 
ness. These five gentlemen, Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Dear- 
born, and Robert Smith, were all of this description; for Dearborn 
was only a soldier while his country was invaded; just as the most 
peaceful citizen becomes warlike when attacked by a ruffian. The 
military tj-pe of man, valuable as it was and is, was not represented 
in the cabinet at all. It is also true, that the Jeffersonian theory of 
government is precisely the one that tasks the intellect and stirs the 
passions least, because it excludes even from consideration seven- 
tenths of the questions which usually most perplex governments, its 
chief object being to protect rifjhts, not interests. Interests are 
complex ; riglits are simple. The tariff question is a puzzler if you 
view it as aifecting existing interests; but if you put the case thus: 
Has an American citizen a riglit to buy a pair of Sunday trousers, 
London made, for four dollars, instead of paying twenty-two for 
the Broadway article? — the case is within finite comprehension. 
Kalph Waldo Emerson and John Gr. Whittier go to Washington 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 631 

demanding to be protected, at home and abroad, in their rirjJit to 
the product of their lifetime's arduous and noble toil. Pirate pub- 
lisher meets them there with the thieves' natural plea: Stolen books 
are cheaper than books honestly paid for. Republican government 
waives all that complicated nonsense out of hearing, and considers 
but two points, both easy: 1, Does the Constitution give us juris- 
diction ? 2, Is the demand of these ornaments of their country 
just? How adapted to human capacity such questions! Away- 
faring man, unless a book-peddler, need not err therein. 

Bat there never was a time when the politics of the world were 
so difficult as then. "Every country but one," as Jeff'erson said, 
" demolished ; a conqueror roaming over the earth with havoc and 
destruction, a pirate spreading misery and ruin over the face of the 
ocean. Indeed, my friem.l, ours is a bed of roses. And the system 
of government which shall keep us afloat amidst this wreck of the 
world w^ill be immortalized in history." It was a bed of roses, 
because the simple aim of the republican administration was to 
have nothing whatever to do with this prodigious and astounding 
broil, except to sell refreshing provisions to both combatants, and 
pick up any thing in the way of a Louisiana or so that might get 
loose in the contest. 

But, after all, it is the Arnold who makes the Rugby ; it is the 
Fellenberg who renders possible the " self-governing college," so 
pleasingly revealed to vis by Mr. Robert Dale Owen ; and it was the 
large, benign, commanding intelligence of the chief which alone 
could have united and exalted a group of men to the height main- 
tained by this peerless administration. Washington, Adams, and 
Madison, all had dissension in their cabinets. Jefferson alone had 
none. He gave them his confidence without reserve. "If I had 
the universe to choose from," he said to them all in 1801, " I could 
not change one of my associates to my better satisfaction ; " and in 
1809, he said the same, with only a change of tense. Nor did any 
thing like a serious diff"erence of opinion ever arise among them. 
"All matters of importance or difficulty," he once wrote, "are sub- 
mitted to all the heads of departments composing the cabinet, some^- 
times by the president consulting them separately and successively, 
as they happen to call upon him ; but, in the greatest cases, by call- 
ing them together, discussing the subject maturely, and finally tak- 
ing the vote, in which the president counts himself but as one. So 



632 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

that, in all important cases, the executive is in fact a Directory, 
which certainly the president might control; but of this there 
never was an example, either in the first or the present administra- 
tion." 

In his use of the pardoning power, he was governed by principles 
that rendered that absurd relic of Divine Right comparatively harm- 
less. 

These principles are two in number. In a letter to Edmund 
Randolph, of 1808, he stated them both : 1. To entitle a criminal to 
the remission of a penalty, " extraordinary and singular considera- 
tions are necessarj^ ; " otherwise, the pardon of. the criminal would 
be "to repeal the law" that condemned him. 2. '•' Tlie opinion of 
the judges who sat in the cause I have ever required as indispensa- 
ble to ground a pardon." 

He submitted to the outrages of the press. 

We are now too familiar with this policy to appreciate either its 
novelty or its difficulty in the early years of the present century. 
Jefferson both believed and proved that a public man, fit for his 
place and doing his duty, cannot be injured by a hostile press. 
This truth we now all know, and have seen it tested many times ; 
but in ISOl it was a discovery. iSTor was there then in Christendom 
one government besides that of the United States strong and able 
enough to permit freedom of the press. Bonaparte's, of course, was 
not. Pitt's was not. Nor was there a government in all Europe 
where the idea of a free press could be entertained. And what 
made Jefferson's triumph the more remarkable was, that the Feder- 
alists were the " vocal class." It was they who tilled most pulpits, 
wrote most books, edited most papers, presided in most courts, 
pleaded most causes, and taught in most colleges. They were 
denominated the educated class. Education, at that day, did not 
mean the acquisition of knowledge, but of scholarship ; wiiich, while 
it cultivates the communicating talents, may leave the prejudices 
intact, and is compatible with the last degree of mental servility 
and narrowness. A man may become a genuine scholar and remain 
a Jesuit. The Federalist leaders, 'too, were exasperated beyond 
mortal endurance. Their self-love was torn all to pieces. They 
had predicted their own speedy return to power : tliey saw their 
minority dwindling at every election. They foretold anarchy : they 
saw universal order and general content. They had prophesied 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 633 

financial chaos : they saw every obligation of the governmen met, 
its debt steadily diminished, its credit perfect, its only embarrass- 
ment a surplus. They had expected a suppression of the navy : 
they now saw, for the first time, the navy put to its legitimate use 
in teriBinating the piracies of the Algerines. They had dreaded anl. 
expulsion from office of all their adherents : they saw the right of I 
opinion respected, and no man disturbed in his place, except for a > 
reason that did not include his political creed. They had predicted | 
a reign of loafers and scallawags : they saw the great offices filled 
with men who were both refined by scholarship and enlarged by 
knowledge. They had foretold a base subserviency to France : they 
saw the president win from France the most valuable acquisition 
that one country ever gained from another since the creation, and f 
this without bloodshed. They had predicted insult and rash hostil- 
ity to Great Britain : they saw the moment come when, with uni- 
versal acclamation, Jeff'erson could have had a war with England, 
and yet he held back the conflict for another four years, every 
month of which made that conflict less unequal. 

It is not in mortals to behold with equanimity such brilliant and 
triumphant wisdom in the career of a person against whom they 
are publicly committed. The leading Federalists seem to have been 
equally puzzled and indignant. C. C Pinckney could only attrib- 
ute the strengthening hold Jefferson had of the public confidence 
to " the infatuation of the people." John Quiney Adams thought 
that Jefferson's success was owing to an unaccountable run of good 
luck. " Fortune," said he, '• has taken a pleasure in making Jeffer- 
son's greatest weaknesses and follies issue more successfully than if 
he had been inspired with the profoundest wisdom." (This in 1804. 
Before Mr. Jefferson went out of office Adams was a Republican.) 
Gouverneur Morris, the jovial and witty aristocrat, set it down, 
Froude-fashion, to the natural baseness of merchants and traders. 
It was a favorite fiction of the class of Tories represented by Morris, 
that the counting-room is the centre and resort of all that is sordid 
and contemptible. Bvit Morris did not despair of the republic. 
" When the people," said he, " have been long enough drunk, they 
will get sober; but while the frolic lasts, to reason with them is 
useless. Their present leaders take advantage of their besotted 
condition, and tie their hands and feet ; but if this prevents them 
from running into the fire, why should we, who are their friends, 




634 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

complain ? " Fisher Ames thought it was all a piece of impudent, 
reckless imposture, which just happened to succeed. " ISfever 
before," wrote he, " was it attempted to play the fool on so great a 
scale." Hamilton solved the enigma with the utmost ease, in his 
old manner; his central, immutable principle being this, Man is 
an ass. In his usual high-stepping style, he remarks, " Mankind 
are forever destined to be the dupes of bold and cunning imposture." 
Old John Adams, " nursing his wrath to keep it warm," fulminated 
comparative history, but thought the people would open their eyes 
at la^^t. " If," said he, "the talents, the policy, the address, the 
power, the bigotry and tyranny, of Archbishop Laud and the court 
of Charles the First were not able to destroy or discredit sound 
principles in 1630 or 1635, there is little cause of apprehension for 
them from the feeble efforts of the frivolous libertines who are 
combining, conspiring, and intriguing against them in 1802." 

How instructive is all this ! How eloquent it is against intrust- 
ing the rights of a nation to the custod}' of a class ! 

If the uppermost men of the opposition wrote thus in their confi- 
dential correspondence, we can imagine the tone and style of the 
party press. The falsehoods which had been accumulating for 
three presidential elections, with the new atrocities of Callender 
and others, formed a mass of calumny from which the mildest and 
the fiercest county editor could draw every week the slanders most 
congenial to his disposition. They did so. The State courts gave 
members of the administration a fair means of redress, and some of 
them appear to have thought of bringing suits for libel. Jefferson 
avowed their right to do so ; but said he, in various forms of expres- 
sion, " Let us prove to the world that an administration which has 
nothing to conceal has nothing to fear from the press." It is the 
means which the press has of giving publicity to events which 
makes it one of the great powers of the modern world. When it 
utters falsehood, the party injured is itself " I admit," he wrote to 
an old friend in 1808, " that restraining the press to truth, as the 
present laws do, is the only way of making it useful. But I have 
thought it necessarj' first to prove that it can never be dangerous." 
Again, in his second inaugural, he spoke of the importance to man- 
kind of this experiment to ascertain whether a government that 
did no act which it would be unwilling the whole world should 
witness could be written down. " The experiment has been tried," 



JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 635 

said he. " You have witnessed the scene ; our fellow-citizens 
looked on, cool and collected ; they saw the latent source from 
which these outrages proceeded ; they gathered around their public 
functionaries ; and, when the Constitution called them to the decis- 
ion by suffrage, they pronounced their verdict, honorable to those 
who had served them, and consolatory to the friend of man, who 
believes he may be trusted with the control of his own affairs." 

Such were some of the preliminary and minor excellences of this 
unique administration. Of themselves, they would not have car- j 
ried it far. We are familiar with the theological student of tradi-Y 
tion, who advertised for a home in a family where a pious examplel 
would be considered an equivalent for his board. Of similar* 
absurdity we might accuse the head of a nation who should expect 
to satisfy the people by being a virtuous, attentive, and rational 
man. That, indeed, is highl}- desirable ; but it was for something 
else that the people assigned to Mr. Jefferson quarters in their 
White House at Washington. 



CHAPTER LXIII. 

THE ALGERINE PIRACIES. 

How rapidly the face of the world changes in these modern 
times ! As recently as 1794, it was a common occurrence for such 
a letter as the following to be read out in church at seaport towns, 
like Boston, Salem, ISTewburyport, where, perhaps, the writer had 
been known from his boyhood, and where his family still lived: — 

" I was captured on the 18th of October by an Algerine corsair, 
and stripped of every thing. On arriving at Algiers, I was con- 
ducted to the dey's house ; and in the morning was sent to the 
slaves' bagnio, and there received an iron shackle round my leg, and 
a chain of twenty pounds, and three loaves of coarse bread for 
twenty-four hours, and some water, and was immediately put to hard 
labor. My situation is so deplorable, that to mention but a small 
part of it would require much longer time than I am allowed." * 

And the great cost of ransoming a captured brother and fellow- 
citizen must have been most discouraging to a congregation 
acquainted only with simple manners and frugal habits, — codfish 
for Saturday's dinner, baked beans on Sunday, and a best coat worn 
for twenty years. Here is the bill sent to Mr. Jefferson, plenipo- 
tentiary at Paris, in 1786, for the first American crews ever cap- 
tured by the Barbary pirates : — ' 

For 3 captains, $6,000 each $18,000 

2 mates, $4,000 each 8,000 

2 passengers, $4,000 each 8,000 

14 seameii, $1,400 each ' * 29,600 



$53,600 
For custom, 11 per cent 5,896 



$59,496 



* History of Newburj'port, by Mrs. E. Vale Smith, p. 146. 
686 



THE ALGERINE PIEACIES. 637 

If he was appalled at such a demand (Congress only empowered 
him to offer two hundred dollars a man), what must have been the 
feeling of a Newburyport family in average circumstances, on 
learning that the release of a father, husband, brother, son, 
depended on their raising six thousand hard dollars ! Many a 
homestead was deeply mortgaged, and many sold, to procure the 
money, which sometimes reached Algiers or Tripoli only to find the 
object of compassion in a captive's grave. Nor did the price mate- 
rially decline during the next ten years. In 1794 we find super- 
cargoes quoted at four thousand dollars, cabin passengers at four 
tliOLisand, and cabin-boys at fourteen hundred. Business, it is 
true, could always be done on more favorable terms if the ransom 
was paid in guns, powder, sail-cloth, rope, fast-sailing schooners, 
and naval stores generally ; but against this Jefferson, from first 
to last, set his face, though all the other powers complied. Two 
Moors would sometimes be taken in. exchange for one Christian, and 
a single Turk was regarded as equivalent to half a dozen Christian 
dogs ; but it was necessary first to catch your Turk. This traffic in 
Christians was very profitable. In 1786 the number of captives in 
Algiers alone was officially reported to Mr. Jefferson at twenty-two 
hundred; and during the early autumn of 1793 ten American ves- 
sels were taken by the Barbary corsairs, for the release of the crews 
of which a collection was taken in every church in New England 
on Thanksgiving Day of that year. People gave liberally (one gen- 
tleman subscribed four thousand dollars, "enough to redeem a master 
or supercargo") ; but it was not till the general ransom by Congress, 
in 1796, that the poor fellows saw their homes again. A million 
dollars it cost the government to buy that shameful peace, and 
another million during the four years of Mr. Adams's term to keep 
the peace, a large part of which was paid to the pirates in naval 
stores and ammunition. It is hard to believe that one item in this 
account was officially described as "a frigate to carry thirty-six 
guns, for the Dey of Algiers." But it was even so. The bill that 
Congress paid for her construction, equipment, and navigation to 
Algiers, amounted to $99,727 ; and she went crammed with a 
hundred thousand dollars' worth of powder, lead, timber, rope, 
shells, canvas, and other means of piracy. One hundred and 
twentj'-two captives, however, came home in that year, — 1796,— 
among whom were ten who had been in slavery for eleven years. 



638 LIFE OF THOMAS, JEFFEE SON. 

And liow can we sufficiently admire the impudence of those cor- 
sairs ? A man-of-war, one would think, went very far in merely 
saluting their flag; but that was only a small part of the infamy. 
The pirates returned the salute, and then demanded /rom the man- 
of-war one barrel of powder for every gun they had fired ! Every 
power seems to have conceded .this, as a matter of course, until the 
American consul in 1798 refused. The conversation that occurred 
on this subject between the Bey of Tunis and Consul William 
Eaton is a curiosity of negotiation. The consul endeavored, at 
first, to pass it over as something too trifling for a sovereign prince 
to regard. 

Bet. However trifling it may appear to you, to me it is impor- 
tant. Fifteen barrels of powder will furnish a cruiser, which may 
capture a prize, and net me a hundred thousand dollars. 

Consul. The concession is so degrading, that our nation will 
not yield to it. Both honor and justice forbid; and we do not 
doubt that the world will view the demand as they will the con- 
cession. 

Bey. You consult your honor, I my interest; but, if you wish to 
save your honor in this instance, give me fifty barrels of powder 
annually, and I will agree to the alteration. 

Consul. We shall not expend a thought upon a proposition 
which aims at making us tributary. We will agree to pay for the 
powder you burned in the salute. 

Bey (addressing his minister in Turkish). These people are 
Cheribeenas (Persian merchants). They are so hard there is no 
dealing with them 

In a spirit not unlike this, the Dey of Algiers said, in 1793, tak- 
ing the tone of an injured being, " If I make peace with every- 
body, what shall I do with my corsairs ? What shall I do with my 
soldiers ? They would take off my head for want of other prizes, 
not being able to live upon their miserable allowa'nce." In 1801, 
when Mr. Jefferson came to the presidency, the time had arrived, 
he thought, to place the intercourse of the United States and the 
Barbary Powers on a diffefent footing. 

The practice of electing to the presidency a man grown gray in the 



THE ALGERINE PIRACIES. 639 

service of the public had this advantage : An intelligent and patri- 
otic person, while serving in subordinate stations, acquires a great deal 
of special knowledge, gets a particular insight into weak places in 
the system of which he is a part, and perfects in his mind scliemes 
of change or reform. He has often said to himself, " If / were 
president, I would recommend such a plan, or adopt such a meas- 
ure." Of all this knowledge, experience, and reflection, the country 
derives the benefit, if the tried servant of the State happens to be 
one of those rarely-gifted men who possess the strength to execute, 
in the presence of mankind, what they have meditated in seclu- 
sion. 

From the beginning of the national part of his public life, Jeffer- 
son's attention had been, of necessity, drawn to this fell business 
of capturing Christians for ransom. To the reams of despatches 
and reports which he wrote on the subject as plenipotentiary in 
Paris, he was obliged to add annual quires as secretary of state in 
Philadelphia. Frustration followed frustration, until at length, 
when he was no longer in office, the government, in its extreme 
desire to procure the release of men wearing out their lives in bond- 
age, yielded to the pirates' demands, and got the captives home at 
the prodigious cost of money and dignity just named. But now he 
was president. The Federalists had availed themselves of the 
transient delusion of the people in 1797, with regard to the inten- 
tions of the French government, to create a navy ; which Jefferson 
immediately reduced by putting all but six vessels out of commis- 
sion. His first important act as president was to despatch four of 
the six, — three frigates and a sloop, — to the Mediterranean to 
overawe the pirates, and cruise in protection of American commerce. 
Thus began the series of events which finally rendered the com- 
merce of the world as safe from piracy in the Mediterranean as it 
was in the British Channel. How brilliantly Decatur and his 
gallant comrades executed the intentions of the government, and 
how, at last, the tardy naval powers of Europe followed an example 
they ought to have set, every one is supposed to know. Commo- 
dore Decatur was the Farragut of that generation. There was 
something really exquisite in Jefferson's turning the infant navy 
of the infant nation to a use so legitimate, but also so unexpected 
a-nd so original. What in 1785 he had urged the combined naval 



640 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

powers to attempt, he was enabled to begin to effect in 1805 by the 
confidence of Congress and tlie valor of a few heroes. There is 
something peculiarly pleasing in the spectacle of a peace-man's 
making a successful fight, when that fight is clearly forced upon 
him by au essential difference in the grade of civilization between 
himself and his enemy, — the only justification of a war that will 
stand modern tests. 



CHAPTER LXIV. 

LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 

The acquisition of Louisiana was, also, the completion of mucli 
wbicli Jefferson had meditated years before. He may have heard 
Dr. Franklin repeat, in 1784, the remark which the acute old man 
once made to Mr. Jay, " I would rather agree with the Spaniards 
to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi, 
than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbor might as well ask me 
to sell my street-door." Whether he heard it or not, his public acts 
and utterances show that he agreed with Dr. Franklin. As secre- 
tary of state in 1790, Avhen there appeared some danger of Great 
Britain seizing New Orleans, he gave it as his official opinion to 
President Washington, that, rather than see Louisiana and Florida 
added to the British Empire, the United States should brave the 
risks of joining actively in the general war then supposed to be 
impending. But not less averse to the French possessing it, he 
warned them also, in the same year, to let it alone. The French 
minister in Philadelphia was supposed to have indulged a dream of 
planting a new colony of his countrymen somewhere within the 
vast and vague Louisiana that was once all their own. The secre- 
tary of state gave him Punch's advice, Don't. He caused it to be 
softly intimated to him after his return to France, through the 
American minister there, that such a project could not be advan- 
tageous to France, and would not be pleasing to the United States. 
Fratice, he owned, might sell a few more yards of cloth and silk in 
that country ; but, said he, the Count de Moustier did not take into 
consideration *' what it would cost France to nurse and protect a 
colony there till it should be able to join its neighbors, or to stand by 
itself, and then what it would cost her to get rid of it." And there 
was something else the Count did not think of. "The place being 

41 611 



642 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

ours," added Mr. Jefferson, "their yards of cloth and silk would he 
as freely sold as if it were theirs." This in 1790, twelve years 
hefore there there was an}^ expectation of the place being ours. 

The war-cloud of 1790 hle>v over, and. the Sj)aniards remained, 
in possession. Trouble enough they gave the government during 
the rest of Jeiferson's tenure of ofSce. Holding both Florida and 
Louisiana, they sometimes stirred up the Creehs to war, they 
always interposed obstacles to the free outlet of the products of 
Kentucky, and they occasionally threatened to close the mouth of 
the river altogether to American commerce. In many a vigorous 
despatch, Jefferson remonstrated with the Spanish government, 
warning them that a spark might kindle a flame in the breasts of 
"our borderers," which could not be controlled. "In such an 
event," he wrote in 1791, " Spain cannot possibly gain ; and what 
may she not lose ?" Next year he demanded a frank and complete 
concession of the right to navigate the river; appealing, finally, to 
the law of nature, written on the heart of man in the deepest char- 
acters, that the ocean is free to all men, and the rivers to all who 
inhabit their shores. The treaty was concluded ; but there was 
never a year thereafter in which the Kentuckiaus were not in feud, 
more or less violent, with the Spanish authorities at New Orleans. 
There were times when only the strong, instinctive regard for law 
and decorum which marks men who own no laws but of their own 
making, prevented "our borderers" from seizing New Orleans, and 
setting the Spaniards floating down toward the sea. 

Jefferson had not been president two mouths before Louisiana 
became again a subject of anxious concern with him. A despatch 
from Rufus King, American minister in London, dated March 29, 
1801, contained an intimation of startling import. It was whis- 
pered about, he said, in diplomatic circles, that Spain had ceded. 
Louisiana and Florida to France ! Can it be true ? Some weeks 
later Mr. King, who felt all the import of such a change, conversed 
with Lord. Hawksbury on the subject, using as a text Montesquieu's 
remark, "It is happy for the commercial powers that God has per- 
mitted Turks and Spaniards to be in the world, since of all nations 
they are the most proper to possess a great empire with insignifi- 
cance." " We are contented," said Mr. King, " that the Florid.as 
should remain in the hands of Spain, but should not be willing to 
see them transferred, except to ourselves." By Floridas he meant 



LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 643 

Louisiana and Florida. Lord Hawksbury proved on this occasion 
that he perfectly divined Bonaparte's object. He said in June, 
1801, what Bonaparte avowed in April, 1803, that the acquisition of 
Louisiana was tlie beginning of an attempt to undo the work of the 
Seven Years' War. During all the rest of the year 1801, we see 
Mr. Madison writing anxiously to tho American ministers in Paris, 
London, and Madrid : How is it about this rumored cession of 
Louisiana? Inquire. Send us information. 

Those gentlemen inquired diligently. Mr. King, in December, 
1801, was all but sure the cession had been made, and sent what he 
believed to be a true copy of one of i the treaties involving the ces- 
sion. Mr. Livingston had "broken the subject" to two of Bona- 
parte's ministers. Both denied that the province had been ceded. 
One of them, in reply to an intimation that the United States would 
buy it, said, "Xone but spendthrifts satisfy their debts by selling 
their lands ; " adding, after a pause, "but it is not ours to give." 
Talleyrand also (December, 1801) declared that the cession had only 
been talked of. In March, 1802, when Mr. Livingston had been 
several months in Paris, he was stiJl unable to get official informa- 
tion of a treaty which had then been in existence a year. But he 
had no serious doubts. "It is a darling object with the Pirst Con-^ 
sul," he wrote to Mr. Madison, March, 24, " who sees in it a means 
to gratify his friends and to dispose of his armies. There is a man 
here who calls himself a Frenchman, by the name of Francis Tater- 
gem, who pretends to have great interest with the Creek nations. 
He has been advanced to the rank of a general of division. He 
persuades them that the Indians are extremely attached to France, 
and hate the Americans; that they can raise twenty thousand 
warriors ; that the country is a paradise. I believe him to be a mere 
adventurer, but he is listened to." 

This news, confirmed from many quarters and inferred from many 
facts, was alarming indeed. Nor could it be longer confined to 
ofiScial circles. Kentucky was in a flame. The president was 
deeply stirred ; for he was as well aware as Rufus King that the 
new master of the mouth of the Mississippi was not a person whom 
an eloquent despatch could intimidate. The Spaniards had retained 
Louisiana on sufferance : the United States could have it at any 
time from them; but the French would be likely to hold their 
ancient possession with a tighter clutch, and not content themselves 



644 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

with two or three trading-posts in a fertile territory large enough 
for an empire. Jeflferson, from the hour when the intelligence 
reached him, had only this thought : The French must not have 
New Orleans ; no one but ourselves must own our own street-door. 
He had been a year in pursuit of his object before the public sus- 
pected that the peace of Amiens was only a truce ; and he was pre- 
pared to join the next coalition against Bonaparte, rather than not 
accomplish it. So far was Mr. Livingston from anticipating Jeffer- 
son's scheme, that he, as he himself reports, "on all occasions 
declared, that, as long as France conforms to the existing treaty 
between us and Spain, the government of the United States does 
not consider herself as having any interest in opposing the ex- 
change." These words v/ere written January 13, 1802. The 
despatches which he received from Washington in May must have 
surprised him, for they notified him that the government of the 
United States was resolved to prevent the exchange. 

Besides the formal and official despatches which Mr. Madison 
wrote on the subject, the president himself addressed to Mr. Living- 
ston one of those letters of fire which he occasionally produced when 
his whole soul was set upon accomplishing a purpose. On the one 
hand, the United States could not let the French control the mouth 
of the Mississippi ; on the other, the president felt that a conflict with 
Napoleon would finally necessitate an *' entangling alliance " with 
Great Britain. The one chance, he thought, of avoiding both these 
giant evils lay in an appeal to the reason of Napoleon, for whose 
understanding he had then some respect. This powerful letter, 
though directed to the American minister, was evidently aimed at 
the intellect of the First Consul. He began by saying, that, of all 
the nations in the world, France was the one with which the United 
States had the fewest points of probable collision, and the most of a 
communion of interests; and for this reason we had ever esteemed 
her our natural friend, viewing her growth as our own, her misfor- 
tunes ours. But — 

" There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is 
our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which 
the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market ; 
and from its fertility it will e^-e long yield more than half of 
our whole produce, and contain more than half our inhabitants. 



LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 645 

France, placing herself in that door, assumes to us the attitude of 
defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for years. Her 
pacific dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase 
our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would 
he hardly felt by us ; and it would not, perhaps, be very long before 
some circumstance might arise which might make the cession of it 
to us the price of something of more wortli to her. Not so can it 
ever be in the hands of Prance : the impetuosity of her temper; the 
energy and restlessness of her character, placed in a point of eternal 
friction with us ; and our character, which, though quiet, and Joving 
peace and the pursuit of wealth, is high-minded, despising wealth 
in competition with insult or injury, enterprising and energetic as 
any nation on earth, — these circumstances render it impossible that 
France and the United States can continue long friends when they 
meet in so irritating a position. They, as well as we, must be blind 
if t])ey do not see tliis; and we must be very improvident if we do 
not begin to make arrangements on that hypothesis. The day that 
France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is 
to restrain her forever within her low-water-mark. It seals the 
union of two nations, who, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive 
possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry our- 
selves to the British fleet and nation. We must turn all our atten- 
tions to a maritime force, for which our resources place us on very 
high ground ; and having formed and connected together a power 
which may render re-enforcement of her settlements here im- 
possible to France, make the first cannon which shall be fired in 
Europe the signal for tearing up any settlement she nyiy have 
made, and for holding the two contiijents of America in sequestra- 
tion for the common purposes of the United British and American 
nations." 

His conclusion was, that it was for the most obvious interest of 
both nations for France to cede Louisiana to the United States ; but 
if that could not be, then, at least, the island of New Orleans and 
Florida, making the Mississippi River the boundary between the 
possessions of the two countries. " But still," added the president, 
" we should consider New Orleans and the Floridas no equivalent 
for the risk of a quarrel with France produced by her vicinage." At 
this time the rumor prevailed that Florida also had been ceded to 



646 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSOIf. 

France ; which proved to be not the case, much to the cost of the 
United States a quarter of a century Liter. 

It happened that an ancient French friend of Jefferson's, M. 
Dupont de Nemours, a republican exile of the Kevolution, was go- 
ing home, in the spring of 1802, after a long residence in the United 
States, to spend the evening of his life in his native country. To 
him the president intrusted this letter open, urging him, before 
sealing it, to possess himself thoroughly, of its contents, in order 
that he might aid in "informing the wisdom of Bonaparte" and 
enlightening the circle that surrounded him, "In Europe," wrote 
JetTersbn to this republican statesman and author, "nothing but 
Europe is seen ; " a remark nearly as true in 1873 as it was in 1802. 
"But," he continued, "this little event, of France's possessing her- 
self of Louisiana, which is thrown in as nothing, as a mere make- 
weight in the general settlement of accounts, — this speck which 
now appears as an almost invisible point in the horizon, — is the 
embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides 
of the Atlantic, and involve in its effects their highest destinies." 
He asked another service of this friend, who was not less a friend to 
the United States than to the president. Talleyrand, Minister for 
Forei'-'n Affairs, was at this moment, if we may believe M. Thiers^ 
.the minister who could do most to soothe the blinding passions of 
Napoleon, and dispose him to a reasonable view of things. But 
Talleyrand was supposed to be out of humor with the United 
States, on account of the explosion of 1797, commonly called the 
X Y Z affair ; when it was a point of party tactics with the Federal- 
ists to maintain that Talleyrand was the person who "struck" the 
American envoys for twelve hundred thousand francs. The presi- 
dent requested M. Dupont to endeavor to talk Talleyrand out of this 
ill-humor, by assuring him that the people who spread abroad that 
story had been consigned to private life, while those now in power 
were "precisely those who disbelieved it, and saw nothing in it but 
an attempt to deceive our country." He had even another re- 
quest, so intent was he upon this vital business. He begged M. 
Dupont to deliver the letter to Chancellor Livingston with his own 
hands, and to charge Madame Dupont, if any accident happened 
to him, to deliver it with her own hands. 

The letter and Mr. Madison's despatches reached Mr. Livingston 
in due time. M. Dupont could not do much toward " informing the 



LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 647 

wisdom of Bonaparte." He did himself the honor of detesting 
Bonaparte and all his works ; refused to serve under liim when office 
was offered ; and at last, when the tyrant returned from Elba, the 
old man, past seventy-five then, despairing of his country, declared 
he would no longer be exposed to pass, in a day, from one master to 
another, comme une coiirtisane ou un couvtlsan, took ship for the 
United States, and spent the rest of his life on his son's farm in 
Delaware. 

Nor can it be said that Mr. Livingston made much impression 
upon Bonaparte's wisdom. Bonaparte had no wisdom to inform. 
He was fully resolved upon his scheme of colonizing Louisiana on a 
grand scale : the ships were designated, and officers were appointed. 
The expedition was to consist of two ships-of-the-line, " several 
frigates," three thousand troops, and three thousand workmen. 
Bernadotte was first thought of for governor of the colony ; but the 
appointment finally fell to Lieutenant-General Victor, who after- 
wards bore the ridiculous title of Due de Bellune, and survived all 
that histrionic pageant nearly long enough to see its mimicrj^ mim- 
icked in our own day. Mr. Livingston could make no head against 
the infatuation of the First Consul. He wrote an "essay," of which 
he had twenty copies printed, and extracted froni Tallej-^rand a prom- 
ise to "give it an attentive perusal." But he could not so much as 
prevail upon him to submit the case to his master. It would be 
"premature," said the minister ; "for the French government has 
determined to take possession first." Mr. Livingston felt the useless- 
ness of all attempts to prevent the departure of the fleet. " There 
never was, " he wrote to Mr. Madison, September 1, 1802, " a govern- 
ment in which less could be done by negotiation than here. Thore 
is no people, no legislature, no counsellors. One man is every thing. 
He seldom asks advice, and never hears it unasked. His ministers 
are mere clerks ; and his legislature and counsellors are parade 
officers. Though the sense of every reflecting man about him is 
against this wild expedition, no one dares to tell him so." 

The whole twenty-eight volumes of the correspondence of Napo- 
leon, recently given to the world, might be cited in proof of Mr. 
Livingston's remarks; but the man never appears to have lived in 
quite such a tumult of business and passion as during that year and 
a half of "peace." In turning over the other volumes, the reader 
hears, from first to last, the steady roll of the drum, the rattle of mus- 
42 



648 LIEE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

ketry, the thunder of cannonade, the short, sharp word of command ; 
and he marks everywhere an assumption that fighting is the chief 
end of man, to which all other pursuits are immeasurably inferior. 
But in these two volumes of the year X, vulgarly styled 1802, there 
is such a rush of projects and topics demanding notice of the head 
of the nation, that we cannot discover a gap large enough to admit 
a modest and polite old gentleman, hard of hearing, with a request 
that the First Consul would please to be so good as to relinquish Ips 
Louisiana scheme, and cede all those uncounted and unknown square 
miles to a country, which, according to Talleyrand, was of no more 
account in general politics that Genoa. Suppose it was on the 4th 
of May that Mr. Livingston desired a hearing. That day, in the 
lingo of the E,evolution, which Bonaparte still employed, was called 
Floreal 14, An X. It was a busy day, indeed, with the First Consul ; 
for he was disposing the minds of men to view his next step toward 
an imperial throne, without an unmanageable excess of consternation. 
How sweetly this great histrionic genius discoursed to the Council 
of State that morning ! " In all lands, force yields to civic qualities. 
Bayonets fall before the priest who speaks in the name of Heaven, 
and before the man whose learning inspires respect. I have said to 
military men who had scruples, that a military government could 
never prevail in France until the nation had become brutalized by 
fifty years of ignorance. Soldiers are only the children of the citi- 
zens. The army, it is the nation." Turn over a few leaves, and you 
catch him scolding Bertliier for not pushing the conscription vigor- 
ously enough. " Mecndtmr/,^' he adds, " is the first and most imjjor- 
tant concern of the nation^ Meanwhile, we see him thanking the 
Senate for a new proof of their confidence, in having made him 
First Consul for ten years longer. "You judge that I owe a new 
sacrifice to the peoj)le. I shall make it if the will of the people com- 
mands that which your suffrage authorizes." 

This new lease of absolute power brought with it a world of 
urgent business, in the intervals of which there was nothing too 
high for him to meditate and no detail too trifling for him to rule. 
It was a case of one 7)iind trying to govern a country, instead of all 
the mind in it, which alone is competent to the task. If a general 
fights ^ duel, it is the First Consul who exiles him to that dread 
Siberia of the French of that age, " thirty leagues from Paris." 'A 
soldier kills himself for love : it is the First Consul who issues an 



LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 649 

Order of the Daj' on the subject: "A soldier should know how to 
bear up under the grief and melancholy of the passions : there is as 
much true courage in enduring anguish of mind with constancy as 
in standing firm under the steady tire of a battery." A young lady 
is attentive to the poor daring an epidemic; and it is still the First 
Consul wlio sends her twentj'- thousand francs, and a note telling 
her what a good girl she is. 

In his strong desire to accomplish the purpose of his government, 
Mr. Livingston had recourse, like manj' otlier anxious diplomatists, 
to Jok^ph Bonaparte. Joseph told him that his brother was his 
own counsellor, but at the same time an affectionate brother, to 
whom he had access at all times, and whose attention he could call 
to any subject. He assured the American minister that his brother 
had read with attention the essay, or memoir, upon Louisiana, which 
Mr. Livingston had prepared. Perhaps he liad. One thing is 
certain : the First Consul held to his purpose. The expedition was 
delayed, but not abandoned. December 19, 1802, Victor was or- 
dered to despatch a member of his staff to Washington to notify the 
French minister there that the French government was about to 
take possession of Louisiana; and February 3, 1803, there was an 
order given (8 Correspondence, 199) showing that the expedition 
was still under sailing-orders, and soon to depart. Livingston 
despaired of getting New Orleans by negotiation. His earnest 
" notes " to Talleyrand remained unnoticed. His opinion was this : 
If we want New Orleans, we must seize it first, and negotiate after- 
wards. To Madison he wrote in November, 1802 : Nothing can 
now prevent the sailing of the expedition; it will be off in twenty 
days ; two and a half millions of francs are appropriated to it For- 
tify Natchez, strengthen all the upper posts. 

All these efforts on the part of the administration to solve this 
problem by peaceful methods were unknown to the people of the 
United States. Kentucky saw the right of deposit denied by a 
foolish Spanish governor, and heard rumors of the Frencli expedition, 
which magnified it four times, making its three thousand troops and 
three thousand workmen, " twenty thousand troops." The press 
and stump of Kentucky, it is said, began to utter words like these : 
*'The Mississippi is ours by the law of nature, by the authority of 
numbers, and bj' the right of necessity. If Congress cannot give it 
to us, we must take it ourselves. No protection, no allegiance ! " 



650 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

The Federalists were not backward to talce up this promising cry. 
"The Freiich troops are ah-eady at sea," said Gouverneur Morris : 
"their arrival should be anticipated; it is time to come to an- open 
rupture." With all his own fine patience, the president bore in 
silence, for a whole j'ear, the outcry of the Kentuckians and the 
misinterpretation of the Federalists. But only a few daj's of the 
new 3'ear, 1803, had passed before he perceived the necessity of some 
measure which the people could know, discuss, and observe. He 
wrote to his old friend, Monroe, January 10 : — 

« 
"I have but a moment to inform you that the fever into which 
the Western mind is thrown by the affairs at New Orleans (denying 
the right of deposit), stimulated hy the mercantile and generally 

the Federal interest, threatens to overbear our peace I shall 

to-morrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission 

to France Pray work night and day to arrange your affairs 

for a temporary absence, perhaps for a long one." 

Two months later Mr. Monroe was travelling post-haste from 
Havre to Paris, charged with the president's fullest instructions, 
authorized to give two millions of dollars, if he could do no better, for 
the island of New Orleans alone, and empowered by Congress to pay 
cash down on the conclusion of the bargain. X Y Z was not forgot- 
ten. Ready money might still have a certain weight in Paris, the 
president thought, when he recommended the appropriation. 

How changed the situation in April, 1803, from the time when 
the president stunned Mr. Monroe with the announcement of his 
nomination I For some months, as we see so plainly in his Corre- 
spondence, Bonaparte had been working himself up to the point of 
breaking the peace of Amiens; fuming about Malta, about the 
assaults of the London press, about the Count D'Artois wearing the 
decorations of the old monarchy at a dress-parade in England, and 
all those other silly half-preteXts which he afterwards enumerated ; 
while urging his minister of war to take every man from the 
villages which a merciless conscription could extort. At length, 
February 19, 1803, there fell from his pen, while he was writing his 
imitation-message to his sham legislature, the taunt, once so famil- 
iar to all the world, "In England, two parties contend for power. 
One has made peace with us, and seems decided to maintain it. The 



LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 651 

other has svrorn implacable hate against France. "While this 
struggle lasts, it is but prudence on oiir part to have five hundred 
thousand men ready to defend and avenge ourselves. However the 
intrigue in London may issue, no other people will be drawn into 
the contest; and the government says with just pride, Aloxe 
Englaxd cannot to-day hold her own against France ! " 
The very next day the order went to the Louisiana expedition at 
Dunkirk : Don't sail till further orders. George IIL was prompt 
enough with his retort. He read Bonaparte's message about Febru- 
ary 23; and on March 8 he sent to the House of Commons the 
lumbering message in twenty lines, that gave Napoleon Bonaparte 
the pretext he longed for, and began the war that ended at — Sedan. 
The king merely acquainted his faithful Commons, that, as consider- 
able military preparations were going on in France, England, too, 
must begin to think of " additional measures of precaution." Bona- 
parte continued the contest by storming at the English ambassador 
in the Tuileries, at a Sunday reception, in the sight and hearing of 
the whole diplomatic corps, two hundred in number. In a word, 
both parties meant war ; and war they had, to their hearts' content. 

A month passed of intensest preparation on both sides. Bona- 
parte's plan was to invade England, — a thing of immense difficulty 
and vast expense. He wanted monej^, and dared not press the 
French people further at the beginning of a war. On Easter 
Sunday, April 10, in the afternoon, after having taken conspicuous 
part in the revived ceremonies of the occasion (Mr. Monroe being 
still many leagues from Paris, but expected hourly), the First 
Consul opened a conversation with two of his ministers upon 
Louisiana.' One of these ministers, who reports the scene, was that 
old friend of Jefferson's, Barbe-Marbois, for whom, twenty-six years 
before, he had compiled his Notes on Virginia, — a gentleman ten 
years resident at Philadelphia, where he married the daughter of a 
governor of Pennsylvania. The other minister had served in 
America under Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War. 

"I know," said the First Consul, speaking with "passion and 
vehemence, — "I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been 
desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who aban- 
doned it in 1763. A few lines of a treaty have restored it to me, and 
I have scarcely recovered it when I must expect to lose it. But, if it 
escapes from me, it shall one day cost dearer to those who oblige me 



652 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

to strip myself of it than to those to whom I wish to deliver it. 
The English have successively taken from France, Canada, Cape 
Breton, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the richest portions of 
Asia. They shall not have the Mississippi, which they covet. I 
have not a moment to lose in putting it out of their reach : I think 
of ceding it to the United States. I can scarcely say that I cede it 
to them, for it is not yet in our possession. If, however, I leave the 
least time to our enemies, I shall only transmit an empty title to 
those republicans whose friendship I seek. They only ask of me 
one town in Louisiana : but I already consider the colony as entirely 
lost ; and it appears to me, that, in the hands of this growing power, 
it will be more useful to the policy, and even to the commerce of 
France, than if I should attempt to keep it." 

He paused to hear the opinion of the two ministers. Barbe-Mar- 
bois said, in a long discourse, The province is as good as gone. 
Let the Americans have it. The other said at great length, No: 
there is still a chance of our being able to keep it ; it will be time to 
give up so precious a possession when we must. The three contin- 
ued to converse on the subject till late at night, and the master 
broke up the conference without announcing his decision. The 
ministers remained at St. Cloud. At daybreak Barbe-Marbois 
received a summons to attend the First Consul in his cabinet. 
Despatches had arrived from England, showing that the king and 
ministry were entirely resolved upon war, and were pushing prepa- 
rations with extraordinary vigor. When M. Marbois had read these, 
Bonaparte resumed the subject of the evening's conversation : — 

"Irresolution and deliberation," he said, "are no longer in reason. 
I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I will cede : it 
is tlie whole colon j^, without any reservation. I renounce it with the 
greatest regret. To attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly. 
I direct you to negotiate this affair with the envoys of the United 
States. Do not even await the arrival of Mr. Monroe : have an 
interview this very day with Mr. Livingston. But I require a great 
deal of money for this war, and I would not like to commence it 
with new contributions. If I should regulate my terms according 
to the value of those vast regions to the United States, the indem- 
nity would have no limits. I will be moderate, in consideration of 
the necessity in which I am of making a sale ; but keep this to your- 
self. I want fifty millions of francs, and for less than that sum I 



LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 653 

• 
will not treat : I would rather malce a desperate attempt to keep 
those fine countries. To-morrow you sliall liave your full powers." 

The deed was done. The rest was merely the usual cheapening 
and chaffering that passes between buyer and seller when the com- 
modity has no market-price. Mr. Monroe's arrival was well timed ; 
for Mr. Livingston had lost all faith in the possibility of getting 
New Orleans by purchase, and was unprepared even to consider a 
proposition for buying the whole province. He evidently thought 
that the French ministers were all liars together ; and he looked 
upon this sudden change of tone, after so many months of neglect or 
evasion, as a mere artifice for delay. " If Mr. Monroe agrees with 
me," said Livingston to Talleyrand, a day or two before Monroe's 
arrival, " we shall negotiate no further on the subject, but advise our 
government to take possession. The times are critical ; and, though 
I do not know what instructions Mr. Monroe may bring, I am per- 
fectly satisfied they will require a precise and prompt notice. I am 
fearful, from the little j)rogress I have made, that my government 
will consider me a very indolent negotiator." Talleyrand laughed. 
" I will give you a certificate," said he, " that you are the most im- 
portunate one I have yet met with.'' 

But Mr. Livingston soon discovered that all had really changed 
with regard to Louisiana. On the day after Monroe's arrival, while 
sitting at dinner with him and other guests, Livingston espied M. 
Barb#-Marbois strolling about in his garden. During the interview 
thalffollowed, business made progress. Marbois took the liberty of 
telling a few diplomatic falsehoods to the American minister. 
Instead of the " fifty millions," which, in his History of Louisiana, 
he says Napoleon demanded, he told Mr. Livingston that the sum 
required was one hundred millions. He represented the First Consul 
as saying, " Well, you have charge of the treasury : make the 
Americans give you one hundred millions, pay their own claims, and 
take the whole country." Mr. Livingston was aghast at the magni- 
tude of the sum. After a long conversation, Marbois dropped to 
sixty millions ; the United States to pay its own claimants, which 
would require twenty millions more. "It is in vain to ask such a, 
thing," said Livingston : " it is so greatly bej'^ond our means." He 
thought, too, that his government would be perfectly satisfied wuth 
New Orleans and Florida, and bad no disposition to extend across 
the river." 



654 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Then it was that Mr. Monroe, fresh from Washington, and know- 
ing the full extent of the president's wishes, knowing his aversion to 
tlie mere proximity of the French, came upon the scene with deci- 
sive and most happy effect. In a few days all was arranged. M. 
Barbc-Marbois's offer was accepted. Twenty daj^s after the St. 
Cloud conference, and eighteen days after Mr. Monroe's arrival, the 
convention was concluded which gave imperial magnitude and com- 
pleteness to the United States, and supplied Napoleon with fifteen 
millions of dollars to squander upon a vain attempt to invade and 
ravage another country. _M. Marbois relates, that, as soon as the 
three negotiators had signed the treaties, they all rose and shook 
hands. Mr. Livingston gave utterance to the joy and satisfaction of 
them all. 

" We have lived long," said he, " but this is the noblest work of 
our whole lives. The treaty which we have just signed has not been 
obtained by art nor dictated by force, and is equally advantageous to 
the two contracting parties. It will change vast solitudes into flour- 
ishing districts. From this day the United States take their place 
among the powers of the first rank. The United States will re- 
establish the maritime rights of all the world, which are now usurped 
by a single nation. The instruments which we have just signed 
will cause no tears to be shed : they prepare ages of happiness for 
innumerable generations of human creatures. The Mississippi and 
Missouri will see them succeed one another and multiply, truly worthy 
of the regard and care of Providence, in the bosom of equality, under 
just laws, freed from the errors of superstition and bad government." 

Bonaparte was so well pleased with the bargain, that he gave M. 
Marbois one hundred and ninety-two thousand francs of the pro- 
ceeds. Sixty millions, he said, was a pretty good price for a province 
of which he had not taken possesssion, and might not be able to retain 
twenty-foun hours. He also said, " This accession of territory 
strengthens forever the power of the United States ; and I have just 
given to England a maritime rival that will sooner or later humble 
her pride." Strange to relate, the British government expressed 
approval of the cession. All the world, indeed, rejoiced or acqui- 
esced in it, excepting alone the irreconcilable fag-end of the Feder- 
alist jjarty, who, from the first rumor of the purchase ';o the voting 
of the last dollar necessary to complete it, opposed the acquisition. 

One of the Federalist members, Josiali Quincy of Massachusetts, 



1 



LOUISIANA PUECHASED. 655 

objected to it on grounds that were elevated and patriotic. Looking 
into the future witli wise but only mortal forecast, he dreaded so 
vast an increase to the territory out of which many slave-States 
could be made. His son relates, that, during the happiest years of 
the Era of Good Feeling under Monroe, he would say, " You and I 
may not live to see the day ; but, before that boy is otf the stage, he 
will see this country torn in pieces by the fierce passions that are 
now sleeping." Both father and son lived to "see the day;" and 
the father, in 1864, his ninety-second year and his last, must have 
clearly seen that slavery, which vitiated all our politics, spoiled 
every measure, and injured every man, was an evanescent thing. 
Slaver}'' passed, but Louisiana remains. "If slavery is not wrong," 
Mr. Lincoln .said, in that homely, vivid way of his, "nothing is 
wrong." It was so wrong, that, while it lasted, nothing in America 
could be quite right, except war upon it. 

One consideration embarrassed the president amid the relief and 
triumph of this peaceful solution of a problem so alarming. He, a 
strict constructionist, had done an act unauthorized by the Consti- 
tution. He owned and justified it thus : " The Constitution has 
made no provision for our holding foreign territorj', still less for 
incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The executive, in 
seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advances the good of 
their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The legis- 
lature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties, and risking 
themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and 
throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized, 
what we know they would have done for themselves had they been 
in a situation to do it. It is the case of a guardian, investing the 
money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; 
and saying to him when of age, I did this for your good ; I pretend 
to no right to bind you; you may disavow me, and I must get out 
of the scrape as I can ; I thought it my duty to risk myself for 3'ou. 
But we shall not be disavowed by the nation ; and their act of indem- 
nity will confirm and not weaken the Constitution, by more strongly 
marking out its lines." He proposed that the case should be met 
by an additional article to the Constitution. It is to be regretted 
that this was not done ; for, let us travel as far away as we will from 
the strict JefFersonian rule, to strict construction we must come 
back at last, if it takes a century of heroic struggle to reach it. 



656 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

It was like Jefferson, when he had won Louisiana, to think first 
of offering the governorship to Lafayette. It had to remain a 
thought only. Upon re-considering the situation, he deemed it best 
not to gratify a sentiment by an act which might be construed as a 
reflection upon the seller. Andrew Jackson, who was then getting 
tired of serving as judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, was 
strongly urged for the place; and because he had been urged, and 
because he would have liked the appointment, he refrained from call- 
ing upon the president when he was in Washington in April, 1804. 
So I gathered in Nashville from a yellow and musty letter of the 
learned judge, — which was, perhaps, the worst-spelled and most 
ungrammatical letter a judge of a supreme court ever wrote. He 
said, that, if he should call upon the president, it would be regarded 
as " the act of a courteor ; " and, therefore, he " traviled on, enjoying 
his own feelings." He confessed, too, that the governor of Louisi- 
ana ought to be acquainted with the French language. Peojile can 
forgive bad spelling when it expresses sentiments so honorable ; and 
happy the president when the expectants of ofiice behave in so con- 
siderate a manner. 



CHAPTEE LXV. 

DOWNFALL OF AARON BURR. 

Not long after Jefferson had entered into possession of Louisiana, 
rumors reached him that Aaron Burr, for many years his political 
ally, and recently his associate in the government, was rousing the 
western country to wrest the province from the United States, and 
annex it to some vaguely imagined empire of Mexico. Burr's 
scheme need not detain us here. It is only as a curious illustration 
of the party ferocity of that time that I recall attention to it for a 
moment. In recent times we have had nothing resemhling the 
blind, malignant fury of party passion which raged in the breasts 
of men, otherwise reasonable, during the decline of the Federalists. 
As that party grew smaller, it seemed as if the whole sum of bitter- 
ness which had been diffused in the brimming cup of 1800, remained 
in the lees and dregs at the bottom of the vesseL Jefferson did 
not exaggerate when, on sending his nephew to school at Phila- 
delphia, during the second term of his presidency, he told him that 
the more furious Federalists were little more sane than the patients 
of Bedlam, who needed medical more than moral counsel. 
/ " Be a listener only," he continued. '•' Keep within yourself, and 
,endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially on 
''politics. In the fevered state of our country no good can ever result 
from any attempt td set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in 
fact or principle. Thej' are determined as to the facts they will 
believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, 
therefore, as you would by an angry bull : it is not for a man of 
sense to dispute the road with such an animal. You will be more 
exposed than others to have these animals shaking their horns at 
you because of the relation in which you stand to me. Full of 
political venom, and willing to see me and to hate me as a chief in the 
42 657 



658 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

antagonist party, your presence will be to them what the vomit-grass 
is to the sick dog, a nostrum for producing ejaculation. Look upon 
them exactly with that eye, and pity them as objects to whom you 
can administer only occasional ease." 

Persons familiar with the politics of that period will recognize the 
truth of this picture. Jefferson might well place it among the first 
objects of his administration to allay the fury of a party spirit; for at 
that time the bloody code of the duellist was still despotic in politi- 
cal circles, and political estrangements were only too apt to result in 
tragedies that desolated families and appalled society. Duels more 
groundless, and, I may say, more devilish, than some which took 
place in the United States during the first few years of the present 
century, have seldom occurred out of Ireland. Consider, for example, 
the incredible ferocity of the duel between De Witt Clinton and 
John Swartwout in 1802, when Swartwout, after the fifth exchange 
of shots, and while the surgeon was extracting from his leg the 
second ball, stood firmly at his post, and demanded a written apology 
or another fire. 

Less known, but perhaps more remarkable, was the duel which 
occurred on the same spot between the eldest son of Alexander Ham- 
ilton and George Eacker. I have often thought, that, among the 
many reasons which induced Alexander Hamilton to submit to the 
barbarous custom of duelling, was the very fact, that his own son 
had recently done so, and in circumstances similar to those of his 
own fatal encounter. Yov although the quarrel between Philip 
Hamilton and his antagonist appeared to originate in a common 
theatre brawl, yet, in reality, such was not the case : the two young 
men belonged to opposite political parties, and their dispute origi- 
nated in hostile political feeling. 

On Friday evening, November 21, 1801, a play was performed 
in the only theatre then existing in the city of Kew York. In 
one of the stage boxes, with a party of friends, sat Mr. George I. 
Eacker, a young lawyer of some note in the town, a member of the 
Republican party, then in the first year of its possession of the 
national government. He was twenty-seven years of age. On the 
Fourth of July preceding he had delivered the oration at the Demo- 
cratic celebration of the day, in the course of which he had probably 
spoken of the Federal magnates with the freedom usual on such 
OCcasioiK at that period. Mr. Eacker was a perfectly respectable 



DOWNFALL OF AAEON BURR. 659 

and honorable gentleman ; certainly he was entitled to be treated 
with respect in public by his juniors. In the course of the evening, 
he heard loud conversation behind him, accompanied with derisive 
laughter; and, upon looking round, he observed that it came from 
two well-known young men, Philip Hamilton and a Mr. Price. It 
was evident to Mr. Eacker that these young gentlemen were talking 
about liini, and laughing at him. Philip Hamilton, at this time, 
was twenty years of age, a recent graduate from Columbia College, 
and just entering upon the study of the law. Price, the son of a 
respectable gentleman of the city, was somewhat noted for his disso- 
lute habits and roystering ways. 

Mr. Eacker at first took no notice of their behavior. At the end 
of the play, while the audience were waiting for the after-piece to 
begin, the two merr}^ young blades crowded into the box occupied 
by Eacker and his friends, where they at once began to make sarcas- 
tic remarks upon the Fourth of July oration before alluded to, and 
it was but too evident that their observations were intended to be 
heard by the person who was the subject of them. Backer's patience 
giving way, he rose from his seat for the purpose, as he said, of 
remonstrating with the young men. As he stepped into the lobby, 
and at a moment when his back was turned toward his assailants, 
he exclaimed, speaking to himself, — 

" It is too abominable to be publicly insulted by a set of d — d 
rascals." 

Both men instantly asked, "Whom do you call d — d rascals ? " 

Mr. Eacker, wishing to avoid a disturbance in so public a place, 
said to the two young scapegraces, — 

" I live at No. 50, Wall Street, where I am always to be found." 

" Your place of residence," said young Hamilton, " has nothing 
to do with it," 

Upon which the young men rushed at one another, or, at least, they 
appeared to be about to do so, when one of their friends got between 
them, and compelled them to keep the peace. Eacker urged his 
assailants to make less noise, and proposed that they should go to a 
certain tavern near by, where they could discuss the matter more 
conveniently. To the tavern they went ; and on the way they con- 
tinued to converse in a hostile tone. When they reached the tavern, 
both the young men insisted upon Mr. Eacker's naming the individ- 
ual to whom he had applied the word rascal, 



660 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

" Did you come into the box on purpose to insult me ? " Eacker 
demanded. 

"That is nothing to the purpose," replied one of the young men. 
" We insist upon your particularizing the person you meant to dis- 
tinguish by the appellation of rascal." 

Mr. Eacker again asked : "Did you mean to insult me? " 

" We insist upon a direct answer/' repeated the angry youths. 

"Well, then," said Eacker, justly indignant at their conduct, 
" you are both rascals." 

Upon this the young men, who must have been greatly under the 
influence of drink, went roaring out of the tavern into the street. 

"Gentlemen," said Eacker, "you had better make less noise: I 
shall expect to hear from you." 

« That you shall," said they. 

Mr. Eacker immediately returned to his box in the tlieatre. A 
few minutes after, he received the briefest possible note from Mr. 
Price, challenging him to mortal combat. Before the evening closed, 
a challenge reached him also from young Hamilton. Eacker replied 
to the person who brought the last note, that he had atready received 
a message from Mr. Price, which he had accepted, and was therefore 
" engaged to him." After fulfilling that engagement, he added, he 
should be jirepared to receive a commnnication from Mr. Hamilton. 

On Sunday afternoon, between twelve and one o'clock, at the usual 
duelling-ground on the shores of the Hudson, Eacker and Price met, 
accompanied by their seconds. They exchanged shots three times, 
without doing one another any harm, when the seconds interposed, 
and advised them to make up their quarrel. Both the men, however, 
insisted on a fourth shot, agreeing that afterwards they would shake 
hands and be friends. They fired a fourth time without effect ; 
M'hereupon the jovial Price observed, " Eacker is such a lath of a 
fellow, that I might shoot all day to no purpose." 

Amid the laughter occasioned by this lively sally, the antagonists 
fulfilled their promise by shaking hands, and both parties returned 
to New York. Instantly on the arrival of Eacker in the city, he 
sent word to Philip Hamilton's friend, that, having disposed of Mr. 
Price, he was now ready to receive a communication from Mr. Ham- 
ilton, which could be transmitted to the friend whom he named. 
The two seconds met. They had a long conversation together, both 
of them endeavoring to hit upon some expedient for accommodating 



DOWNFALL OP AAEON BUEK. 661 

the absurd difficulty. There was a great deal of running to and fro 
that afternoon and evening, and many long consultations with those 
who were learned in the art of duelling. Young Hamilton knew 
well that he had been in the wrong, and jet, after the events at 
Hoboken that afternoon, had not the courage to say so; and, consid- 
ering the state of public feeling at that time, such a confession would 
probably have blasted his prospects for life. All that he could be 
persuaded to do was, to send a message to Backer, " requiring an 
explanation of the expressions which he had made use of to Mr. 
Hamilton at the theatre on Friday night." 

The gentleman who conveyed this ridiculous message said, that, if 
Mr. Eacker desired to consult his friends before giving an answer, he 
would retire for a short time to enable him to do so. Mr. Eacker 
accepted the proposal, and asked for fifteen minutes. The messenger 
returning at the end of that time, Eacker at first endeavored to give 
his answer. verball}'-, but, after some hesitation, took from his pocket 
a written paper, which he read as follows : — 

" The expressions I made use of towards Mr. Hamilton at the 
theatre on Friday night last were produced by his conduct on that 
occasion : I thought them applicable then, and I think so still." 

This closed the door to an accommodation, and the meeting was 
appointed for Monday. Young Hamilton being still convinced (as 
his friends afterwards avowed and published) that he had been in 
the wrong, determined to receive the fire of his antagonist, and then 
discharge his pistol in the air, — precisely as his father resolved to do 
three years after, and with precisely the same results. The men 
were placed. The signal was given. Mr. Eacker fired, and inflicted 
a mortal wound. Young Hamilton could not carry out his inten- 
tion, for the shock of his wound discharged his pistol before he could 
raise it into the air. The wounded youth was immediately rowed 
across the river, and taken to a house near the shore, to which his 
parents and friends were speedily summoned. It appeared that the 
ball had entered the right side just above the hip, passed completely 
through the body, and lodged in the left arm. There is a letter in 
the New York Historical Magazine, written by one of his young 
friends a day or two after the event, which contains an affecting 
description of the scene round his bed : — 



662 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

" All the physicians in town were called for, and the news spread 
like a conflagration. At the theatre I was informed of it about nine 
o'clock Monday evening. I immediately ran to the house near the 
State's prison, from whence I was told they dare not remove him. 
Pi-cture to yourself the emotions wliich must have assailed me on my 
arrival at his room, to which I was admitted as his old college class- 
mate ! On a bed without curtains lay poor Phil, pale and languid, 
his rolling, distorted eyeballs darting forth the flashes of delirium. 
On one side of him, on the same bed, lay his agonized father ; on the 
other, his distracted niotlier; around him numerous relatives and 
friends, weeping and fixed in sorrow. Blanched with astonishment 
and aifright was the countenance, which, a few minutes before, was 
illumined by the smile of merriment. I could continue in the room 
but a very short time. Returning home, I quickened my pace 
almost unconsciously, hoping to escape the image as well as the 
reality of what I had witnessed." 

Strange coincidence ! Three years later, near the same place, 
surrounded by nearly the same company, lay the father of this ill- 
starred youth, dying from a similar wound, received in a similar 
encounter, on the same spot ! The young man lingered through the 
night in great agony, and died about five o'clock on the following 
morning. His father was so overcome by his grief, at the funeral, 
that he had to be supported to the grave between two of his friends. 

The hapless youth, whose life was thus suddenly extinguished, 
appears to have been chiefly noted for the gayety of his disposition, 
which made him a favorite with his young friends. It was thought 
a fine thing then for a young man to be dissolute. People foolishly 
regarded it as a proof of spirit; and, consequently, few thought the .^ 
less of '• Phil Plamilton " for being " a gay boy about town." This • 
is another proof that the world is both wiser and better than it was \ 
sixty years ago. We now know that dissipation in a young man is ' 
not an indication of " spirit," but an absolute proof of the want of it. 
Dull, indeed, must be the youth who needs artificial aid to gayety 
and merriment. 

The standing of Aaron Burr in the Republican party was 
destroyed many months before his duel with General Hamilton, and 
it was destroyed by calumny. True it is that the man had no right 
to a place in the party at all 5 for his political convictions, if he had 



DOWNFALL OF AAEON BUER. 663 

any, and the natural bias of his mind, were anti-Republican. Nev- 
ertheless, the specific charge that destroyed hina was false. The 
charge was, that, during the existence of the tie in 1801, he had 
intrigued with the Federalists to be elected to the first place in the 
government, instead of the second. This was not only morally 
improbable, but physically impossible ; but the accusation sufficed, 
in the peculiar circumstances of the time and place, to deprive him 
of the confidence of his party. 

In January, 1804, the year of the presidential election, and six 
months before the duel, he sought an interview with Mr. Jefferson, 
and conversed with him at great length upon his own position. He 
frankly told the president, that, in his opinion, it would be for the 
interests of the Republican party that he should not attempt to secure 
a renomination to the vice-presidency. It would divide the party, he- 
thought ; but, if he were to retire voluntarily, it would be said that 
he shrunk from the public condemnation. 

" My enemies," said he, " are using j^our name to destroy me ; 
and something is necessary from you to prevent it, and deprive them 
of that weapon, — some mark of favor from you, which will declare 
to the world that I retire with your confidence." 

Mr. Jefferson replied, that as he had never interfered with the 
election of 1800, nor with the choice of candidates, so in the election 
then coming on, he was observing the same line of conduct : he held 
no councils with anybody respecting it, nor suffered any one to speak 
to him on the subject, as he believed it to be his duty to leave him- 
self to the free discussion of the public. 

" I do not," continued the president, " at this moment know, nor 
have ever heard, who were to be proposed as candidates for the pub- 
lic choice, except so far as can be gathered from the newspapers." 

Mr. Jefferson did not respond favorably to Colonel Burr's request 
to be appointed to one of the great offices in the president's gift. 
Politics make strange bedfellows. Without liking or ever impli- 
citly trusting Colonel Burr, he had been connected with him for 
many years by party ties ; and Burr had certainly contributed mate- 
rially to the success of the Republican party in 1800. He had lived 
on terms of perfect civility with the vice-president, but no more. 
On this occasion, he distinctly enough declined to nominate Burr to 
the office which, doubtless, both of them had in their minds at the time, 
— that of minister to France. Colonel Burr left the matter with 



664 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

the president for further consideration. The subject, however, was 
never renewed between them. 

Burr pursued his destiny. Defeated in a contest for the gover- 
norship of New York, he challenged to mortal combat his old rival 
at the bar and constant opponent in politics, Alexander Hamilton, 
whom he must have regarded as the chief cause of his late failure. 
That fatal duel on the 11th of July, 1804, made him a fugitive and 
a wanderer on the face of the earth. He returned, however, to 
Washington, where he completed with credit his term of service as 
vice-president, and then entered upon that career of western adven- 
ture and conspiracy which ended in his total ruin. 

In the spring of 1806, before taking the irretrievable step, being 
in the city of Washington, he again applied to the president for an 
a2")pointment. He claimed, and justly claimed, that he had assisted 
to place the present administration in power. He added, that he 
could do Mr. Jefferson much harm, but he wished to be on different 
grounds with him. He was now disengaged from all particular 
business, was willing to engage in something, and should be in 
town some daj^s, if the president should have any thing to propose 
to him. 

The president had nothing to propose to him. Mr. Jefferson 
replied, — 

" I have always been sensible that you possessed talents which 
might be employed greatly to the advantage of the public ; and, as 
to myself, I have a confidence, that, if you were employed, you would 
use your talents for the public good. But you must be sensible that 
the public have withdrawn their confidence from you; and in a gov- 
ernment like ours it is necessary to embrace in its administration 
as great a mass of public confidence as possible, by employing those 
who have a character with the public of their own, and not merely 
a secondary one through the executive." 

" If we believe a few newspapers," said Burr, '^ it may be sup- 
posed that I have lost the public confidence ; but you know how 
easy it is to engage newspapers in any thing." 

" I do not refer," rejoined the president, " to that kind of evidence 
of your having lost the public confidence, but to the late presiden- 
tial election, when, though in possession of the office of vice-presi- 
dent, there was not a single voice heard for your retaining it. As 



DOWNFALL OF AAEON BUBK. 665 

to any harm you can do me, I know no cause why you should 
desire it ; hut, at the same time, I fear no injury which any man 
can do me. I have never done a single act, or been concerned in 
any transaction, which I fear to have fully laid open, or which could 
do me any hurt if truly stated." 

Burr remained in Washington for a month after this interview, 
during which he dined with the president ; and, when he was about 
to depart, he called to take leave. Soon after he directed his course 
westward, and was seen in Washington no more. 

A year passed. The disappearance from the scene of his former 
activity of so remarkable a person as Colonel Burr was, of itself, 
provocative of curiosity. But in September, 1806, the president 
began to receive intimations of strange and suspicious movements 
in the western country, in which Burr seemed to be the chief per- 
son concerned. He deemed it best to send to the Ohio George 
Graham, a confidential clerk in the War-Office, who was directed to 
ascertain the nature and object of these movements. Graham 
directed his course to Blennerhassett Island, where a few conversa- 
tions witli the credulous lord of the isle made him acquainted with 
the general purport of the scheme. Meanwhile Mr. Jefferson 
received from General Wilkinson unquestionable proofs that an 
irregular and lawless project of some kind was on foot, of which 
Aaron Burr was the ruling spirit. A short proclamation shattered 
the scheme in an instant, and made the adventurer a fugitive in the 
Alabama forests. He was arrested, and brought to Eichmond for 
trial. 

And now the Federalists gave another proof of what I have 
before deliberately asserted, that, of all the parties that ever rose to 
power in a free country, this one, composed chiefly of the educated 
portion of the people, was the most destitute of political morality. 
What could Aaron Burr have done against the Federalists that he 
had not done ? He had actively opposed them from the first year 
of their existence as a party. He had been one of the principal 
means of their expulsion from power. He had resisted their over- 
tures to reconciliation. He had slain their leader. And now he had 
engaged in a scheme, which, though it might have stopped short of 
treason, was known to be impi-oper and unlawful. Nevertheless, no 
sooner had he reached Richmond a prisoner, than the Federalists 



66Q LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

took liim up, aifected to sympathize with him as a martyr, extolled, 
caressed, and feted him. John Marshall, chief justice of the 
Suj)reme Court of the United States, — even he, a man punctili- 
ously just when politics were not involved, accepted an invitation 
to a dinner given in honor of Aaron Burr, and which he was 
expressly informed Aaron Burr was to attend. The judge 
dined in comjjany with the man whom he knew he was about to 
try on a capital charge. Federalists in Kew York made a pretence 
of retaining a briefless barrister, named Washington Irving, himself 
a Federalist, who went to Richmond, ostensiblj^ to take part in the 
trial, but really to employ in behalf of the prisoner the most ele- 
gant pen of America. The long list of able advocates who assisted 
Burr did so quite as much for party as for professional reasons. 

Luthur Martin, then the head of the Maryland bar, made no 
secret that the motive which actuated him was political. This 
strange, and now almost forgotten character, was born in New Jer- 
sey, in 1744 ; and, after graduating at Princeton, wandered off to 
Maryland, where he tauglit school, studied law, and was admitted to 
practice. Very early in his career' he became a man of distinction ; 
for he served in Congress during the Revolutionary War ; and by 
the time he was forty years of age, he was, beyond all comparison, 
the head of the bar in the State of Maryland. At a time when 
learning was the prime requisite for success at the bar, and the' 
quality held in most respect both by the profession and the people, 
he was admitted to be the most learned of lawyers. At what period 
of his life he fell under the slavery of drink, no one has recorded. 
But we know that before he was fifty years of age the habit was 
fixed, and had made serious depredations on his character and 
talents. 

When young Roger Taney, in 1795, came up to Annapolis to 
study law, and visited the court where the three judges still wore 
long scarlet cloaks, and sat in a solemn row in three great chairs on 
a lofty platform, he was all curiosity to see the great Luther Martin, 
then near the height of his reputation. Great was the disappoint- 
ment of the youth. He saw before him a coarse-looking, dirty, and 
ill-dressed man, who had come into court under the influence of 
liquoi". His attire was a distressing mixture of the gay and the 
unclean. He wore ruffles at his wrists, bordered with costlj' lace, 
although they had long ago gone out of fashion ; and those ruffles, 



DOWNFALL OF AARON BURR. .667 

conspicuously broad, were rumpled and dirty. His voice, always 
harsh, cracked when he was much excited ; his arguments were full 
of digressions ; and, as he indulged in constant repetition, his 
speeches were usually very long. He was really a very good scholar, 
and wrote with classical correctness ; but he seemed to take a bar- 
barous pleasure in using such words as cotch for caught, and sot for 
sat. At a table, too, his manners were coarse and disgusting. 

With all these obvious and offensive faults, which constantly grew 
upon him, he held his place at the head of his profession for at 
least twenty years. Tiie late Chief-justice Taney explains this 
mystery : — 

" He was a profound lawyer. He never missed the strong points 
of his case ; and, although much might have been generally better 
omitted, everybody who listened to him would agree that nothing 
could be added. Pie had an iron memory, and forgot nothing that 
he had read ; and he had read a great deal on every branch of 
law, and took pleasure in showing it when his case did not require 
it. Many years after I came to the bar, when I was engaged in an 
important case on the same side with Mr. Shaaff, and Mr. Martin 
was opposed to us, Mr. Shaaff and myself went over the case to- 
gether very carefully ; and when we had done with the examination, 
he said, ' I think the case is with us, and I see nothing in it to be 
afraid of; hut I am always afraid of Martin.^ Yet Mr. Shaaff 
ranked then with the foremost men in Maryland." 

The greatest of Luther Martin's professional triumphs was at 
the trial of Judge Chase of the Supreme Court, in 1805, at Wash- 
ington. Judge Chase was a violent, arrogant man, who, it was 
charged, had allowed his prejudices as a politician to influence his 
decisions as a judge. The impeachment created universal interest, 
and attracted a great multitude of people from all parts of the 
country. Aai'ou Burr, the vice-president, presided ; and the Sen- 
ate Chamber was fitted up in grand style, with places for the for- 
eign ambassadors, members of the House of Representatives, and 
other spectators. The senators sat in a great semicircle on each 
side of the vice-president, and the temporary galleries were draped 
with blue cloth ; the whole presenting a scene that must have been 
striking in the extreme. A special interest was imparted to the 



668 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

trial by the situation of Colonel Burr. His duel with Hamilton 
had occurred a few months before ; two indictments for murder 
were hanging over his head ; and he had been for months a fugitive 
from justice. But he bore himself on this occasion with a coolness 
and dignity that excited universal admiration. He conducted the 
trial, as an editor of the day remarked, "with the dignity and 
impartiality of an angel, but with the rigor of a devil." 

The working man of this trial, he whose exertions decided its 
issue, was Luther Martin. He was not only a friend and fellow- 
citizen of Judge Chase ; but he sympathized with him in politics 
to the uttermost. Martin was an infuriate Federalist, or, as Jeffer- 
son called him, " a Federal bull-dog ; " and he threw himself into 
the defence with a mixture of coolness and impetuosity, of passion- 
ate ardor and quiet dexterity, altogether peculiar to himself. Every 
specification he sifted to the bottom, and exhausted every argument 
tending to refute it. For four weeks, during which the trial lasted, 
he was always in his place, prompt, indefatigable, vigilant. It 
was unquestionably he who secured the judge's acquittal. Many 
of the charges were distinctly proved ; but on no one of them was 
he condemned by a two-thirds vote, which the laws require. He 
was at once convicted and acquitted. 

Two years after Aaron Burr himself was on trial at Richmond. 
He remembered the great services of Luther Martin, and secured 
his assistance for his own defence. Into this service Martin 
entered with a zeal due more to his hatred of Jefferson than to 
his love of Burr; and for six months he abandoned all his other 
cases, and devoted himself — heart, soul, and purse — to the deliv- 
erance of his client. He became one of Burr's sureties ; and took 
the opportunity to declare, in open court, that he was glad to have 
this opportunity to give a public proof of his confidence in Colonel 
Burr's honor, and of his conviction that he was an innocent man. 
The vehemence of some of his harangues at that trial, as well as 
their indecency, was most remarkable. On one occasion he said 
that the president and his cabinet were " bloodhounds, hunting Burr 
with a keen and savage thirst for blood." His fury against Jeffer- 
son was such as to excite the suspicion in the president's mind 
that he was one of Burr's accomplices. The truth is, however, 
that strong drink tends to destroy all soundness and moderation of 
judgment; and at this time there never was a waking hour when he 
was not under the influence of it. 



DOWNFALL OF AAEON BTJER. 669 

It was this unconcealed political character of the trial, as well as 
the great number and great ability of the counsel for the defence, 
that induced the president to take that active part in directing 
the trial which surprises to this day the readers of his correspond- 
ence. It so happened, too, that George Hay, the attorney-general 
of Virginia, who conducted the prosecution, was very far from being 
the peer of the great lawyers on tile other side. It was at Jeffer- 
son's own request that the brilliant William Wirt lent to the 
l^rosecutiou the aid of his respectable character and effective decla- 
mation. Almost daily Jefferson assisted the prosecution by letters 
to the attorney-general. It had been more dignified, perhaps, and 
more proper, if he had held himself aloof from all such interference. 
Nothing, however, can be more evident than that the object T^hich 
Martin and his colleagues had nearest their hearts was, not to save 
Aaron Burr, but to damn Thomas Jefferson; and human beings 
are so constituted, that they do not usually submit to be destroyed 
without an effort to prevent it. Hence he gave to his friend, 
George Hay, the benefit of his legal knowledge. He was also con- 
vinced that the mind of the chief justice was so warped by political 
prejudice, that he was disqualified from giving impartial decisions. 
The judge's dining with Burr before the trial was an act which 
the judge himself afterward regretted. Nor can I believe that 
John Marshall, in his later years, would have sustained an opinion 
which he threw out in the course of this trial, that the president 
co.uld himself be compelled to appear in the court as a witness. 
Jefferson's reply to this appears unanswerable. 

"As to our personal attendance at Richmond," he wrote, "I am 
persuaded the Court is sensible that paramount duties to the nation, 
at large control the obligation of compliance with their summons in 
this case, as they would, should we receive a similar one to attend 
the trials of Blennerhasset and others in the Mississippi territory, 
those instituted in St. Louis and other places on the western waters, 
or at any place other than the seat of government. To comply 
with such calls would leave the nation without an executive branch, 
whose agency, nevertheless, is understood to be so constantly neces- 
sary, that it is the sole branch which the Constitution requires to 
be always in function." 



670 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Tlie course of public events produced a decisive commentary on 
this passage of the president's letter. Two days after it was 
written occurred the attack upon the American frigate Chesapeake 
in Chesapeake Bay by an English vessel of war, which roused the 
indignation of the whole country to a degree never surpassed 
before or since. The mere absence of the president from the seat 
of government at that moment might have precipitated the two 
countries into war, for which an immense majority of the people 
were prepared. 

Burr was acquitted on technical grounds. He left the court, 
however, covered with an opprobrium which still clings to his name. 
The report of the trial satisfied every reasonable mind, that, in 
arresting the scheme and the schemer, the president had done an 
act which he could not have omitted without grievous fault. The 
conduct of the Federalists, during the trial of Burr, would have 
filled up the measure of their ruin, if a new issue had not 
arisen that withdrew public attention from it, and gave to the 
combative side of human nature a certain prominence that is 
highly favorable to reactionary ideas. The region of the brain 
where Toryism has its seat lies chiefly behind the ears. 



CHAPTER LXVI. 

THE EMBARGO. 

Jefferson's constitutional aversion to war, and his known prefer- 
ence for peaceful methods of proceeding, gave to the anti-Christians 
of his day a fruitful theme of vituperation. It is amusing to read 
the expressions of scorn to which eminent churchmen gave utterance, 
when they spoke of Jeiferson's principle of exhausting every expe- 
dient known to the diplomatist's art before*entertaining the thought 
of war. " There is just now," wrote Gouverneur Morris, wlien he 
heard of Monroe's appointment, " so much philosojihy among our 
rulers, that we must not be surprised at the charge of pusillanimity. 
And our people have so much of the mercantile spirit, that, if otlier 
nations will keep their hands out of our pockets, it will be no trifling 
insult that will rouse us. Indeed, it is the fashion to say, that, when 
injured, it is more honorable to wait in patience the uncertain issue 
of negotiation than promptly to do ourselves right by an act of hos- 
tility." These are light words; but the spirit which they breathe 
lias desolated many and many a fair province, and shrouded in hope- 
less gloom millions upon millions of homes. All that hideous, 
groundless contest between Bonaparte and George III., which added 
sensibly to the burden of every honest family tln^oughout the whole 
extent of Christendom ; which did harm to every man, and good to 
no man, — all sprang from the spirit which the jovial Morris 
expressed in this gay letter to John Parish. 

In the effort to keep the United States out of that contest, Jeffer- 
son gave a brief access of strength to the anti-Christian party. The 
outrages of the English captains were, indeed, most hard to bear; 
and the question whetlier or not they ought to be borne, was one 
upon which the wisest men might well differ. All the Old Adam, 
and some of the ^e\v, rises and swells within us when we read, even 

671 



672 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

at the distance of seventy _years, of the Leander firing upon a coast- 
ing vessel near Sandy Hook, and killing one of her crew. The 
president felt both the wrong and the indignity of the act. He 
ordered the Leander and her two companions out of the waters of 
the United States. He called upon the civil and military officers to 
arrest the offending captain if found within their jurisdiction. He 
warned all persons against giving aid to the vessels of the squadron. 
But he did something more difficult than such acts' as these. ^Vhen 
the treaty reached his hands, early in 1807, which Monroe and 
Pinckney, after a long and difficult negotiation, had concluded with 
England, discovering that it contained no renunciation of the im- 
pressment claim, and no adequate concession of the rights of neutrals, 
he would not submit it to the Senate, but sent it back to London for 
revision, — to the sore mortification of Monroe. The more mon- 
strous outrage upon the Chesapeake followed, rousing the whole 
people to a degree seldom equalled since America was settled. The 
English ship Leopard j^oured broadsides into the unprepared and 
unsuspecting Chesapeake within hearing of the post we now call 
Eortress Monroe, killed three men, wounded eighteen, and carried 
away four sailors charged with desertion from the British navj^, — 
three Americans and one Englishman. The Englishman was hanged ; 
and the three Americans were pardoned, on condition of returning 
to service. 

Parties ceased to exist. " I had only to open my hand," wrote 
Jefferson once, '' and let havoc loose." Only a president with such a 
deep hold upon the confidence of the people could have kept the 
peace ; nor could any but a Jefferson have done it, because, at such 
a time, the chief of the state is apt- to be himself possessed by the 
universal feeling. He is a fellow-citizen, as well as president. 
But this benignant spirit remained true to itself. " If ever," he 
wrote in 1812, "I was gratified with the possession of power and of 
the confidence of those who had intrusted me with it, it was on that 
occasion when I was enabled to use both for the prevention of war 
toward which the torrent of passion was directed almost irresistibly, 
and when not another person in the United States less supported by 
autliority and favor could have resisted it." Nor was his conduct 
wanting in " spirit." He instantly sent a frigate to England with 
a demand for reparation. He for'bade the naval vessels of Great 
Britain all access to the harbors of the United States, except those 



THE EMBARGO. 678 

in distress and those bearing despatches. Two thousand militia were 
jjosted on the coast to prevent British ships from obtaining supplies. 
Every vessel in the navy was made ready for active service, and 
every px'eparation for war within the compass of the administration 
was pushed forward with vigor. He privately notified members of 
Congress to be ready to respond to his summons on the instant of 
the frigate's return from England. Decatur, commanding at Norfolk, 
was ordered to attack with all his force if the British fleet, anchored 
in the outer bay, should attempt to enter the inner. And the far- 
resounding noise of all these proceedings called home from every 
sea the merchant vessels of the United States. 

He expected war, and meant, if it could not be prevented honora- 
bl}", to make the most of it. He intended, as we see by his confi- 
dential letters to Madison, to swoop upon England's commerce, and 
to avail himself of the occasion to bring Spain to terms. Your 
peaceable gentlemen, if you absolutely force them to a fight, some- 
times lay about them in an unexpected manner. Thus, we find the 
president, on the cool summit of Monticello, in August, 1807, writ- 
ing upon the Spanish imbroglio to Mr. Madison: "As soon as we 
have all the proofs of the Western intrigues, let us make a remon- 
strance, and demand of satisfaction ; and, if Congress approves, we 
may in the same instant make reprisals on the Floridas, until we get 
satisfaction for that and for spoliations, and a settlement of bound- 
ary. I had rather have war against Spain than not, if we go to 
war against England. Our Southern defensive force can take the 
Eloridas, volunteers for a Mexican army will flock to our standard, 
and rich pabulum will be offered to our privateers in the plunder of 
their commerce and coasts. Probably Cuba would add itself to our 
confederation." It is evident that he intended to make this war pay 
expenses, and to come out of it with troublesome neighbors removed 
fartlier off. All his letters of that summer show the two trains of 
thouglit: First, let us have no war, if we can properly avoid it; 
secondly, if we must have war, the conflict could not come at a 
better time than when England has a Bonaparte upon her hands, 
and we have a Spain to settle with. 

Partial repai'ation was made for the outrage upon the Chesapeake, 

and formal '•' regrets " were expressed that it should have occurred ; 

but the claim to board American vessels and carry off" deserters was 

re-affirmed by royal proclamation. No American ship was safe from 

43 



674 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

violation, no American sailor was safe from impressment. In meet- 
ing this new aspect of the case, Jefferson took another leaf from 
Franklin's book. In the Stamp- Act times, before the Revolution, 
Dr. Franklin was always an advocate for the peaceful remedy of 
non-intercourse ; and this had been a favorite idea of Jefferson's 
when he was secretary of state. In 1793, when the allied kings 
tried to starve France into an acceptance of the Bourbons by exclud- 
ing supplies from all her ports, he deemed it "a justifiable cause of 
war." But he wrote to Madison that he hoped Congress, instead of 
declaring war, " would instantly exclude from our ports all the man- 
ufactures, produce, vessels, and subjects of the nations committing 
the aggression, during the continuance of aggression." The embargo 
of 1807, which kept all American vessels and produce safe at home, 
was conceived in the same spirit and had the same object. That 
object was, to use Jefferson's own words, " to introduce between 

NATIONS ANOTHER UMPIRE THAN ARMS." He thought that Great 

Britain, so dependent then upon American materials and supplies, 
could not do without them as long or as easily as we could do with- 
out the money, they brought. 

But this policy was putting human nature to a test which only a 
very few of our race are wise and strong enough to bear. The 
embargo, of course, was passed by large majorities and hailed with 
enthusiasm : it was striking back, in a new and easy way. But 
when commerce came to a stand, when ships and men were idle, when 
produce was of little value, and nothing could be done in the way of 
remedy but to wait, then the embargo was regarded in a different 
light. New England suffered most, not because it lost most, but 
because it was more immediately dependent upon commer'ce than the 
other States. Nor did the educated class in New England give 
moral support to the president in this interesting endeavor to intro- 
duce between nations '' another vampire than arms." 

The inference which he drew from the power of New England in 
finally breaking down the embargo is worthy of note. He attributed 
it to the township system, which he valued most highly, and strove 
long to introduce into Virginia. ^' How powerfully," he wrote in 
1816, "did we feel the energy of this system in the case of the 
embargo ! I felt the foundations of the government shaken under 
my feet by the New England township. There was not an indi- 
vidual in those States whose body was not thrown, with all its 



THE EMBARGO. 675 

momentum, into action ; and, although the whole of the other States 
were known to be in favor of the measure, yet the organization of 
this little selfish minority enabled it to overrule the Union. What 
could the unwieldy counties of the Middle, the South, and the West 
do? Call a county meeting; and the drunken loungers at and 
about the court-houses would have collected, the distances being too 
great for the good people and the industrious generally to attend. 
As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, Carthago 
delendiun est, so do I every opinion with the injunction. Divide 
THE Counties ikto Wards." 

But the embargo lasted to the end of his term. To the end 
of his days, he believed, that, if it had been faithfully observed by 
the whole people, it would have saved the country the war of 1812, 
and procured, what that war did not procure, an explicit renuncia- 
tion of the claim to board and. search. The two great powers of 
Europe gave it their approval, — Napoleon Bonaparte and the Edin- 
burgh Review. There was then living in a secluded village of 
Massachusetts a marvellous boy of thirteen, famous in his county 
for the melodious verses whicli he had been writing for four or five 
years past, some of which had been published in the county paper, 
and one had been spoken with applause at a school exhibition. This 
wonderful boy, hearing dreadful things said on every side of the 
embargo, wrote a poem on the subject, which was published in Bos- 
ton, in 1808, with this title, "The Embargo; or, Sketches of the 
Times. A Satire. Together with the Spanish Revolution and other 
Poems. By William Cullen Bryant." That the father of 
Bryant, and the other ruling spirits of New England, should have 
refused their support to the embargo, is almost of itself enough to 
show that the system was too far in advance of the time to be long 
effectual. But it answered the purpose of delay ; which, in the 
peculiar circumstances, was an immense advantage. " If," said the 
president once, " we can delay but for a few years the necessity of 
vindicating the laws of nature on the ocean, we shall be the more 
sure of doing it with efi'ect. The day is within my time as well as 
yours, when we may say by what laws other nations shall treat us 
on the sea. And we will say it." 

How many things were settled, how many happily begun, during 
these eight years ! At the president's recommendation, the term of 
residence before naturalization was restored from fourteen years to 



676 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

five. He tried, but failed, to procure a recession of the District of 
Columbia, to Virginia and Maryland. — a district which the govern- 
ment needs as much as it does Terra del Fuego. The polic}'^ was 
settled, so far as brilliant precedent could settle it, of paying off 
public debt with all the rapidity that the country can reasonably 
bear. A great public debt exaggerates the importance, the magni- 
tude, and the complexity of government ; and it is a Jeffersonian 
principle, that government should be as small a thing as it can be 
without sacrifice of its desirable efSciency. During these eight 
years, the ocean ports were fortified to a degree, that, at least, ena- 
bled the government to slam tlie door in an enemy's face, and keep 
it shut daring the next war; a successful contest was carried on in a 
distant sea; the militia were re-organized and re-armed; the west- 
ern posts were widely extended; taxes were sensibly diminished; 
thirty-three millions of the old debt were extinguished; and the 
only pecuniary embarrassment the administration ever experienced 
was a surplus, always increasing, for which there was no suitable or 
legal outlet. Every act and every word of the administration was a 
proclamation of welcome to all the world ! All the world came 
thronging to these western shores, bringing w'ith them power, 
wealth, hope, resolve, and all the stuff, material and immaterial, of 
which empire is made. When Jefferson came into power in 1801, 
that man was a wonder to his friends who had seen the nearest of 
the western lakes ; when Jefferson retired in 1809, Astor was busy 
with his expedition to found a town on the Pacific coast. 

The general polic}'' of the government with regard to the Indians 
was then established as it has since i-emained. Jefferson had more 
Indian business than all the other presidents put together. To 
"extinguish " their titles hj fair purchase, to introduce among them 
the arts of civilization, to accustom them to depend more upon agri- 
culture and less upon hunting, and to push them gently back over 
the Mississippi in advance of the coming pioneer, — these were 
among the objects which he desired most to promote. He was not 
sanguine of speedy results. That is an amusing passage in his 
second Inaugural, in which he explains the hinderances in the way 
of the Indian's improvement, and, at the same time, gives some of 
his white brethren a box on the ear. Habit, custom, pride, preju- 
dice, and ignorance, he says, all hold the Indians back; but, in 
addition to these internal foes to progress, there were among them 



THE EMBARGO. 677 

" crafty and interested individuals who feel themselves something in 
the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any- 
other." These were the medicine-men ; who "inculcate a sanctimo- 
nious reverence for the customs of their ancestors ; that whatso- 
ever they did, must be done through all time ; that reason is a false 
guide, and to advance under its counsel, in their physical, moral, or 
political condition, is perilous innovation ; that their duty is to 
remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety, and 
knowledge full of danger. In short, my friends, among them is 
seen the action and counteraction of good sense and bigotry : they, 
too, have their anti-philosophers, who find an interest in keeping 
things in their present state, who dread refox-mation, and exert all 
their faculties to maintain the ascendency of habit over the duty of 
improving our reason and obeying its mandates." This is an exact 
description of the arts and arguments employed, four or five years 
after, by the Prophet, brother of Tecumseh, in rousing the Ohio 
tribes to war upon the white men. 



CHAPTER LXVII. 

CORRESPONDENCE WITH MRS. ADAMS. 

The last two years of Mr. Jefferson's second term were laborious 
and troubled ; and the old longing for home, rest, and tranquillity 
gained full possession of him. The precedent of retiring at the end 
of eight years had not then acquired the force of law, and he could 
unquestionably have been elected to a third term. But eight years 
of the presidency is enough for any man. General Washington 
himself in eight years exhausted his power to render good service in 
that office ; and Jefferson never for a moment had a thouglit but to 
retire at the end of his second term. During his presidency, one 
sad, irreparable breach had been made in the circle upon which he 
relied for the solace of his old age. His younger daughter, Maria, 
Mrs. Eppes, died at Monticello, in 1804. He stood then upon the 
pinnacle of his career. Triumph of every kind had followed his 
endeavors, and a great majority of the people gave him heartfelt 
approval. It was then that this blow fell. " My loss," he wrote to 
his oldest friend, John Page, "is great indeed. . Others may lose of 
their abundance ; but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I 
had." 

Among the letters of condolence which reached him on this occa- 
sion was one from Mrs. Adams, which led to the most interesting 
correspondence of these years. The president, without knowing it, 
had given the deepest offence to this gifted lady; but when the 
intelligence reached her secluded home on the Massachusetts coast, 
of the death of the lovely girl whom she had taken to her arms in 
London eighteen years before, and had cherished ever since as a 
friend, her tenderness proved stronger than her resentment, and she 
was moved irresistibly to write to the bereaved father. She told 
him she would have done so before if he had been only the private 
678 



COERESPONDENCE WITH MRS. ADAMS. 679 

inhabitant of Monticello ; but reasons of various kinds had withheld 
her pen, until the powerful feelings of her heart burst through the 
restraint. She recalled the incidents of her acquaintance witii his 
daughter; and, after distantly alluding to the recent estrangement 
between the families, expressed " the sincere and ardent wish," that 
he might find comfort and consolation in this day of his sorrow and 
affliction. This, she said, was the desire of ''her who once took 
pleasure in subscribing herself his friend." 

In his acknowledgment, after due recognition of her goodness to 
his daughter and to himself, he frankly told her what had given him 
personal offence in the conduct of Mr. Adams: "I can say with 
truth, that one act of Mr. Adams's life, and one only, ever gave me 
a moment's personal displeasure. I did consider his last appoint- 
ments to office as personally unkind. They were from among my 
most ardent political enemies, from whom no faithful co-operation 
could ever be expected, and laid me under the embarrassment of 
acting through men whose views were to defeat mine, or to encoun- 
ter the odium of putting others in their places. It seems but 
common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of 
his own choice. If my respect for him did not permit me to ascribe 
the whole blame to the influence of others, it left something for 
friendship to forgive; and after brooding over it for some little time, 
and not always resisting the expression of it, I forgave it cordially, 
and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him which 
had so long subsisted." 

She replied with great spirit and ability, without a whisper to her 
husband of what was transpiring. General Washington, she said, 
had left no vacancies for his successor to fill ; and she was sure that 
Mr. Adams, in the last appointments, had meant no disrespect to 
Ms successor ; nor, indeed, had it been certain, until after many of 
them had been made, that Mr. Jefferson was to be his successor. 
That point disposed of, she opened her heart as to the causes of 
offence which Mr. Adams had against him. One of these was his 
remission of the fine of Callender, condemned under the Sedition. 
Law for a libel upon President Adams. Besides : " One of the first 
acts of your administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffer- 
ing the just punishment of his crimes for publishing the basest libel, 
the lowest and vilest slander, which malice could invent or calumny 
exhibit, against the character and reputation of your predecessor ; of 



680 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON". 

him, for whom you professed a friendship and esteem, and whom 
you certainly knew incapable of such complicated baseness. The 
remission of Callender's fine was a public approbation of his con- 
duct." Upon this she expanded with eloquence. But Mr. Jefferson 
had done more than remit the fine. He had given Callender fifty 
dollars, and complimented him upon his writings. " This, sir,'' she 
added, " was the sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot, which 
could not be untied by all the efforts of party spirit, by rivalry, by 
jealousy, or any other malignant fiend." There was one other act 
of his administration, she said, which she considered "person- 
ally unkind," and which his own mind would easily suggest to him; 
but, " as it affected neither character nor reputation, she forbore to 
state it." 

He replied to this fine burst of a wife's loyal indignation with 
something of her own warmth and point. "I do not know," said 
he, "who was the particular wretch alluded to; but I discharged 
every person under puuishment or prosecution under the Sedition 
Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity 
as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall 
down and worship a golden image ; and that it was as much my 
duty to arrest its execution at every stage as it would have been to 
rescue from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into 
it for refusing to worship the image. It was accordingly done in 
every instance, without asking what the offenders had done, or 
against whom they had offended, but whether the pains they were 
suffering were inflicted under the pretended Sedition Law," He 
showed her, too, that his compliment to Callender had been written 
before that writer's homely truth had lapsed into coarse libel, and 
that the gifts of money were bestowed to relieve his destitution, not 
reward his scurrility. But there was another act of personal unkind- 
ness to which Mrs. Adams had referred. "I declare, on my 
honor, madam," said he, " I have not the least conception what act; 
was alluded to." 

In her reply, which betrayed a mind only slightly mollified, she 
told him what this act was. The wife had spoken in the previous 
letters ; but it was now the mother's turn : " Soon after my eldest 
son's return from Europe, he was appointed by the district judge to 
an office in which no political concerns entered. Personally known 
to you, and possessing all the qualifications, you yourself being judge, 



CORRESPONDENCE WITH MRS. ADAMS. 681 

• which you had designated for office, as soon as Congress gave the 
appointments to the president you removed him. This looked so 
particuLarly pointed, that some of your best friends in Boston at that 
time expressed their regret that you had done so." 

This was news to Mr. Jefferson. He had sinned without know- 
ing it. With a patient consideration not usual in the head of a 
state, nor even possible to one not gifted with a genius for toil, he 
entered into a minute statement respecting the appointment of the 
commissioners of bankruptcy in Boston ; showing her that the former 
commissioners, of whom John Quincy Adams was one, had not been 
removed by an act of the. president, but discontinued by a change in 
the law. "Had I known," he added, "that your son had acted, it 
would have been a real pleasure to me to have preferred him to some 
who were named in Boston, in what was deemed the same line of 
politics." This last letter, all kindness and benignity, was a distinct 
proffer of reconciliation to the whole family. 

"I hope," said he in conclusion, "you will see these intrusions 
on your time to be, what they really are, proofs of my great respect 
for you. I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to 
differ from me in opinion, without imputing to them criminality. I 
know too well the weakness and uncertainty of human reason to 
wonder at its different results. Both of our political parties, at 
least the honest part of them, agree conscientiously in the same 
object, — the public good ; but they differ essentially in what they 
deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best 
done by one composition of the governing powers ; the other by a 
different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people ; the 
other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, 
time and experience will prove. We think that one side of this 
experiment has been long enough tried, and proved not to promote 
the good of the many ; and that the other has not been fairly and 
sufficiently tried. Our opponents think the reverse. With which- 
ever opinion the body of the nation concurs, that must prevail. My 
anxieties on this subject will never carry me beyond the use of fair 
and honorable means, of truth and reason ; nor have they ever les- 
sened my esteem for moral worth, nor alienated my affections from a 
single friend who did not first withdraw himself. Whenever this has 
happened, I confess I have not been insensible to it, yet have ever 
kept myself open to a return of their justice. I conclude with sin- 



682 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 

cere prayers for your health and happiness, that yourself and Mr. 
Adams may long enjoy the tranquillity you desire and merit, and 
see in the prosperity of your family what is the consummation of 
the last and warmest of human wishes." 

When a poisoned arrow has rankled long in living flesh, the 
wound cannot heal as soon as the arrow is withdrawn. This noble- 
minded lady accepted her correspondent's personal explanations, 
hut she could not help giving him a little lecture about the very 
great importance of appointing the riglit men to office. The arrow 
was withdrawn; but time, the all-healer,' had to perform his part 
before the reconciliation could be complete. Time began upon it at 
once. Soon after she had " closed this correspondence " with one of 
those admonitory prayers by which pious souls sometimes bestow a 
parting slap, she gave the letters to her husband to read. The old 
man was still under a cloud of obloquy, and perhaps not reconciled 
to that sudden change in his way of life which had occurred four 
years before. In the year 1800, his grandson tells us, the letters 
addressed to him might be counted by thousands ; but after his 
retirement to Quincy, he received about two letters a week. He 
could not but be pleased to learn from Mr. Jefferson's letters that 
his good-will was still an object of desire with the chief of the 
nation. When he had read the packet of letters all through, he 
wrote upon the last one these words : " Quincy, November 19, 1804. 
The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without 
my knowledge or suspicion. Last evening and this morning, at the 
desire of Mrs. Adams, I read the whole. I have no remarks to make 
upon it at this time and in this place, J. Adams." Time did the 
rest, with the help of John Quincy Adams. It was all right between 
them in 1812 ; and the letters they exchanged during the rest of 
their lives are among the most interesting the world possesses. 



CHAPTER LXVIII. 

RETIREMENT FROM THE PRESIDENCY. 

Jefferson's final release from public life, after a nearly contin- 
uous service of forty-four years, was now at hand. During the last 
years of his presidency he had lost in some degree " the run " of his 
private affairs, — a fact which any one will understand who has ever 
been absorbed for a long time in concerns of magnitude and diffi- 
culty not personal. Every one who has ever put his whole heart 
into writing a book or conducting a periodical understands it. 
Groceries elude the sweep of vision that takes in all the affairs and 
interests of a great country or a great subject ; and no man can 
easily subside from the triumph of an important measure or the rap- 
ture of a " good number," to that exact consideration which monthly 
accounts demand. Little by little, the mind floats away from all 
that detail, until, at last, a kind of real inability .to grasp it takes 
the place of former vigilant attention ; which is only another way 
of saying that a president should be, if convenient, a married man. 
A few months before his retirement it occurred to him to look into 
his affairs, and see how he was coming out on the 4th of March, 
1809. To his consternation and horror, he found that there would be 
a most serious deficit. His plantations had only yielded four or five 
thousand dollars a year, at the best; but the embargo, by preventing 
the exportation of tobacco, had cut his private income down two- 
thirds. " ISTothing," he wrote to his merchant in Richmond, " had" 
been more fixed than my determination to keep my expenses here 
within the limits of my salary ; and I had great confidence that I 
had done so. Having, however, trusted to rough estimates by my 
head, and not being sufficiently apprised of the outstanding accounts, 
I find, on a review of my affairs here as they will stand on the 3d 
of March, that I shall stand three or four months' salary behindhand. 

683 



684 LIFE OF THOIMAS JEFFEESON. 

In ordinary cases, this degree of arrearage would not be serious ; but 
on the scale of the establishment here it amounts to seven or eight 
thousand dollars, which being to come out of my private funds will 
be felt by them sensibly." He requests his correspondent to arrange 
a loan for him at a Richmond bank, and urges him to lose no time. 
" Since I have become sensible of this deficit," he added, " I have 
been under an agony of mortification, and therefore must solicit as 
much urgency in the negotiation as the case will admit. My inter- 
vening nights will be almost sleepless, as nothing could be more 
distressing to me than to leave debts here unpaid, if, indeed, I should 
be permitted to depart with them unpaid, of which I am by no 
means certain." 

Such is the price, or rather a very small part of the price, which 
citizens of the United States have often had to pay for the privilege 
of serving their country. The privilege is worth the price; but it 
is not safe to put the price so high that only a very great or a very 
little man can find his account in paying it. Poverty and abuse, — 
a Tweed will undertake a city on those terms. So will a Jefferson. 
But Jeffersons do not grow on every bush ; and Tweeds can be had 
on most wharves of any extent. The loan was effected, however; 
and Mr. Jefferson was thus enabled to get home to Monticello 
without danger of being arrested for debt upon the suit of a Feder- 
alist with a taste for a sensation. 

Captain Bacon, with two great wagons each drawn by six mules 
and one drawn by four horses, came from Monticello. He left 
Washington with his wagons loaded, on the 3d of March, leaving 
Mr. Jefferson behind to attend the inauguration of his successor, 
and to close up his various affairs of business and friendship. From 
every quarter of the country came testimonials of grateful regard 
from Republicans; and Federalists, to the last, bestowed upon him 
the homage of their hate and apprehension. Josiah Quincy was 
relieved- by his departure. "Jefferson is a host," he wrote in his 
diary during one of the last embargo debates; "and, if the wand of 
the magician is not broken, he will yet defeat the attempt. But I 
hope his power is drawing to an end in this world." All things end 
at last. Captain Bacon's train of wagons moved away ; and a 
remarkable procession indeed must have arrested the attention of 
passers-by as it hove in sight, heaped high with boxes and shrub- 



EETIREMENT FROM THE PRESIDENCY. 685 

bery, and eleven colored servants stowed away in convenient spots 
on the various summits, followed by tlie president's four-horse car- 
riage. In this last vehicle rode Mr. Bacon, and thus caught some 
of the roadside "ovations" intended for another. The worthy 
manager was nearly three weeks in getting home through the mud 
and storm of a cold, dismal spring; so that Mr. Jefferson overtook 
him at Culpeper Court-House, though he did not start till the 
wagons had been a week on the road. 

" On our way home," Bacon reports, " it snowed very fast, and 
when we reached Culpeper Court-IIouse it was half-leg deep. A 
Lxrge crowd of people had collected there, expecting that the presi- 
dent would be along. When I rode up, they thought I was the 
president, and shouted and hurrahed tremendously. When I got 
out of the carriage, they laughed very heartily at their mistake. 
There was a platform along the whole front of the tavern, and it 
was full of people. Some of them had been waiting a good while, 
and drinking a good deal ; and they made so much noise, that they 
scared the horses, and Diomede backed, and trod upon my foot, and 
lamed me so that I could hardly get into the carriage the next 
morning. There was one very tall old fellow, that was noisier than 
any of the rest, who said he was bound to see the president, — 
* Old Tom,' he called him. They asked me when he would be along ; 
and I told them I thought he would certainly be along that night, 
and I looked for him every moment. The tavern was kept by an 
old man named Shackleford. I told him to have a large fire built 
in a private room, as Mr. Jefferson would be very cold when he got 
there ; and he did so. I soon heard shouting, went out, and Mr, 
Jefferson was in sight. He was in a one-horse vehicle, — a phaeton, 
— with a driver, and a servant on horseback. When he came up, 
there was great cheering again. I motioned to him to follow me ; 
took him straight to his room, and locked the door. The tall olii 
fellow came and knocked very often, but I would not let him in. I 
told Mr. Jefferson not to mind him, he was drunk. Finally 'the 
door was opened, and they r.ushed in .and filled the room. It, was 
as full as I ever saw a bar-room. He stood up, and made a sf?ort 
address to them. Afterwards some of them told him how they hjid 
mistaken me for him. He went on next day, and reached Monti- 
cello before we did." 

But not till he had encountered another snow-storm, still more 



086 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

violent. " As disagreeable a snow-storm as I was ever in," wrote 
Jefferson. During the last three days of the journey he was glad to 
abandon his phaeton and take to one of his horses. On reaching 
Monticello, he found that his sixty-six years had not sensibly 
lessened the vigor of his frame; for this rough journey had done him 
no harm which a night's rest could not repair. 



CHAPTER LXIX. 

AT MONTICELLO. 

After his retirement from the presidency, in 1809, Jefiferson 
lived seventeen . years. He was still the chief personage of the 
United States. Between himself and the president there was such 
a harmony of feeling and opinion, that the inauguration of Madison 
did little more than change the signature to public documents. 
Madison consulted him on every important question ; and Jefferson, 
besides writing frequently and at length, rode over to Orange every 
year, when the president was at home, and spent two or three weeks 
at his house. When there was dissension in the cabinet, it was 
Jefferson who restored harmony. Monroe was in ill-humor because 
Madison had been preferred before himself by the nominating cau- 
cus. It was Jefferson who healed the breach, and thus prevented 
one in the Republican party. During the gloom of 1815, many 
Republicans desired a candidate for the presidency of more executive 
energy than Mr. Madison was then supposed to have ; and Jefiferson 
was himself solicited from many quarters to accept a nomination. 
He said, with convincing power, " What man can do will be done 
by Mr. Madison." In the same year the president proposed that he 
should return to the office of secretary of state, and Monroe become 
secretary of war ; but he pleaded his sixty-nine years as an excuse 
for declining the invitation. 

The success in public life of these two men, Madison and Monroe, 
whose early education he had assisted, as well as the bright 
career which his nephews and sons-in-law were enjoying, induced 
other young men to seek his advice and assistance. " A part of my 
occupation," he wrote to General Kosciuszko in 1810, " and by no 
means the least pleasing, is the direction of the studies of such young 
men as ask it. They place themselves in the neighboring village, 

687 



688 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

and liave tlie use of my library and counsel, and make a part of my 
society. In advising the course of their reading, I endeavor to keep 
their attention fixed on^the main objects of all science, the freedom 
and happiness of man. So that coming to bear a share in the coun- 
cils and government of their country, they will keep ever in view 
the sole objects of all legitimate government." 

Monticello ovorflowed with guests during all these years. The 
circle of those who had a right to seek its hospitality was very large ; 
and many foreigners of distinction felt their American experience 
incomplete until they had paid a pilgrimage to the author of the 
Declaration of Independence. But these were bnt a small portion 
of the throng of guests whom the custom of the country brought to 
Monticello during the summer months. His daughter, Mrs. Ran- 
dolph, said once that she had been obliged to provide beds for as 
many as fifty inmates; and Mr. Randall tells us of one friend who 
came from abroad with a family of six persons, and remained at 
Monticello ten months. It fell to the manager, Mr. Edmund Bacon, 
to keep the mountain-top supplied with sustenance for this crowd of 
people, and tlie animals that carried and drew them. Mr. Bacon 
did not enjoy it, and he has since availed himself of an opportunity 
to relieve his mind. 

"After Mr. Jefferson returned from Washington," he relates, "he 
was for years crowded with visitors, and they almost ate him out of 
house and home. They were there all times of the year ; but about 
the middle of June the travel would commence from the lower part 
of the State to the Springs, and then there was a perfect throng of 
visitors. They travelled in their own carriages, and came in gangs, 
the whole family, with carriage and riding horses and servants ; 
sometimes three or four such gangs at a time. We had thirty-six 
stalls for horses, and only used about ten of them for the stock we 
kept there. Very often all of the rest were full, and I had to send 
horses off to another place. I have often sent a wagon-load of hay 
up to the stable, and the next morning there would not be enough 
left to make a hen's-nest. I have killed a fine beef, and it would all 
be eaten in a day or two. There was no tavern in all that country 
that hail so much company. Mrs. Randolph, who always lived with 
Mr. Jefferson after his return from Washington, and kept house for 
him, was very often greatly perplexed to entertain them. I have 



AT MONTICELLO. 669 

known her many and many a time to have every bed in the house 
fulL I finally told the servant who had charge of the stable to only 
give the visitors' horses half allowance. Somehow or other Mr. 
Jefferson heard of this : I never could tell how, unless it was throug^'i 
some of the visitors' servants. He countermanded my orders. One 
great reason why Mr. Jefferson built his house at Poplar Forest, in 
Bedford County, was that he might go there in the summer to get 
rid of entertaining so much company. He knew that it more than 
used up all his income from the plantation and every thing else; but 
he was so kind and polite that he received all his visitors with a smile,' 
and made them welcome. They pretended to come out of respect and 
regard to him; bat I think that the fact that they saved a tavern- 
bill had a good deal to do with it with a good many of them. I can 
assure you I got tired of seeing them come, and waiting on them." 

Such was the custom of old Virginia ; and a very bad, cruel cus- 
tom it was. All this, too, at a period when non-intercourse and 
war had reduced the income of Virginia planters two-thirds, and 
when Mr. Jefferson had a Washington debt of many thousand dol- 
lars to provide for. But, among this multitude of visitors, there 
were a large number whose company he keenlj'^ enjoyed; nor would 
he permit his guests to rob him of his working-hours. From break- 
fast to dinner, he let them amuse themselves as best they could while 
he toiled at his correspondence and rode over his farms. From din- 
ner-time he gave himself up to social enjoyment. I may well speak 
of his correspondence as toil. One thousand and sixty-seven letters 
he received in one year, which was not more than the average. 
After his death, there were found among his papers twenty-six thou- 
sand letters addressed to him, and copies of sixteen thousand written 
by him. 

To complete his character as a personage, it should be mentioned 
that the Federalists still bestowed upon him the distinction of an 
animosity such as, perhaps, virtuous men never before entertained 
for one of their number. I look with wonder upon the publications 
spread out before me at this moment, issued during the time of non- 
intercourse and war, Jefferson being the theme. Here are two octavo 
volumes of vituperation, entitled " Memoirs of the Hon. Thomas 
Jefferson," published in Kew York several months after his retire- 
ment, and opening thus : " The illustrious Dr. Robertson, in a letter 

44 



V. ggg LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK. 

to IvjLr. Gibb(^n, gave it as bis opinion that an bistorian ougbt to write 
as if he were giving evidence upon oatb." Eight liundred and 
tbirh'-eight pages of innocent and tedious falsehood naturally follow 
this noble sentiment; and they end with a prophecy, that nothing 
Would go well in the United States until the people had turned the 
lA-epublicans out of office, and placed their afifuii;s in the bands of 
"that man who more than any other resembles the Father of his 
Country," — General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The clergy of 
New England continued to revile the greatest Christian America has 
produced in terms surpassing in violence those which the clergy of 
Palestine applied to the Founder of Cbristianity, He was an 
"atheist," Dr. David Osgood of Massachusetts remarked, and no 
better than "the raoe of demons," to whose service he had been 
devoted. By race of demons, this " last of the New England popes " 
meant the people of France. Young Edward Payson of Portland 
signalized his entrance into public life by delivering a Fourth of 
July oration, in which he observed that Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, 
and their colleagues, were men of a character so vile, that " the most 
malicious ingenuity can invent nothing worse than the truth." The 
orator of twenty-three was as innocent as a lamb in saying this ; for 
he was merely echoing what he had heard constantly asserted from 
his youth up, by the men whom he held in veneration, — the clergy 
of Connecticut and the professors in Yale College. In 1809 
appeared a second edition of William Cullen Bryant's Embargo, with 
a certificate to the effect, that '^ Mr. Bryant, the author," had arrived, 
in the Month of Novembei', 1808, at the age of fourteen years. A 
doubt had been intimated in the Monthly Anthology, whether a 
youth of thirteen could have been the author of this poem. The 
reader may be gratified to see a few lines from the earliest volume of 
a poet who has since, in so many ways, both served and honored his 
country. In this poem, too, lives tbe judgment of educated New 
England upon Mr. Jefferson's attempt to keep his country out of 
the maniac fight between Bonaparte and the coalition of kings; for 
this boy, gifted as he was, could only be a melodious echo of the talk 
he had heard in his native village : — 

" Curse of our nation, source of countless woes, 
From wliose dark womb unreckoned misery flows : 
Th' Embargo rages, like a sweeping \\ind, 
Fear lowers before, and famine stalks behind. 



AT MONTICELLO. 691 

"What words, Muse ! can paint the mournful scene, 
The saddening street, the desolated green ? 
How hungry laborers leave their toil and sigh, 
And sorrow droops in each desponding eye ! 

" See the bold sailor from the ocean torn, 
His element, sink friendless and forlorn ! 
His suffering s],onse the tear of anguish shed, 
His starving children cry aloud for bread I 
On the rough billows of misfortune tost. 
Resources fail, and all his hopes are lost ; 
To foreign climes for that relief he flies. 
His native land ungratefully denies. 

" In vain mechanics ply their curious ait, 
And bootless mourn the interdicted mart ; 
While our sage Ruler's diplomatic skill 
Subjects our councils to his sovereign will ; 
His grand ' restrictive energies ' employs. 
And wisely regulating trade destroys. 

" The farmer, since supporting trade is fled. 
Leaves the rude joke, and cheerless hangs his head ; 
Misfortunes fall, an unremitting shower. 
Debts follow debts, on taxes, taxes pour. 
See in his stores his hoarded produce rot, 
Or sheriffs sales his produce brings to nought ; 
Disheartening cares in thronging myriads flow, 
Till down he sinks to poverty and woe. 

" Ye who rely on Jcffersonian skill. 
And say that fancy paints ideal ill, 
Go, on the wing of observation fly, 
Cast o'er the land a scrutinizing eye : 
States, counties, towns, remark with keen review, 
JjQt facts convince, and own the picture true ! 

" When shall this land, some courteous angel, say, 
Throw off a weak and erring ruler's sway 1 
Eise, injured people, vindicate your cause, 
And prove your love of liberty and laws ; 
Oh, wrest, sole refuge of a sinking land. 
The sceptre from the slave's imbecile hand ! 
Oh, ne'er consent obsequious to advance. 
The ivillirif} vassal of imperious France ! 
Correct that suffrage you misused before, 
And lift your voice above a Congress roar. 



692 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

" And thou, the scorn of every patriot's name, 
Thy country's ruin, auil her council's shame ! 
Poor servile tiling ! derision of the brave ! 
Who erst from Tarlton fled to Carter's cave ; 
Thou who, ivhen menaced by perfidious Gaul, 
Didst prostrate to her whiskered minion fall ; 
And when our cash her empty bags supplied. 
Didst meanly strive the (bul disgrace to hide; 
Go, wretch, resign the presidential chair. 
Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair. 
Go, search with curious eyes for horned frogSj 
'j\Iid the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs ; 
Or, where Ohio rolls his turbid stream. 
Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme. 
Go, scan, philosophist, thy .... charms 
And sink supinely in her sable arms ; 
But quit to abler hands tiie helm of state, 
Nor image ruin on thy country's fate. 

"As Johnson deep, as Addison refined. 
And skilled to pour conviction o'er the mind. 
Oh, might some patriot rise ! the gloom dispel. 
Chase error's mist, and break her magic spell ! 

" But vain the wish ; for hark ! the murmuring meed' 
Of hoarse applause from yonder shed proceed ; 
Enter, and view the thronging concourse there, 
Intent, with gaping mouth, and stupid stare; 
While in their midst the supple leader stands. 
Harangues aloud, and flouri:^hes his hands ; 
To adulation tunes his servile throat. 
And sues successful for each blockhead's vote." 

The work contains nearly six hundred lines, several of which 
clearly annonnce the coming poet ; but in these which I have chosen, 
it is the Federalist that speaks. The forming poet of the woods 
appears in a passage where the author of thirteen imagines Com- 
merce starting to life again, amid the desolation of the Embargo, 
when at last the people had expelled from Washington the pimps of 
France : — 

" Thus in a fallen tree, from sprouting roots, 
With sudden growth a tender sapling shoots. 
Improves from day to day, delights the eyes 
With strength and beauty, stateliness and size, 
Puts forth robuster arms, and broader leaves. 
And high in air its branching head upheaves." 



AT MONTICELLO. 693 

It is interesting to discover that a poet who solaced his old age 
by translating Homer had, at thirteen, already begun to pay him 
the homage of imitation. The boy's prediction was fulfilled seven 
years later ; not through the return of the Federalists to power, but 
by the treaty of Ghent, which ended the conflict for neutral rights. 

Abuse and adulation were equally powerless to disturb the seren- 
ity of the lord of Monticello. '• I have rode over the plantation, I 
reckon," reports the worthy Mr. Bacon, " a thousand times with Mr. 
Jefierson ; and when he was not talking, he was nearly always hum- 
ming some tune, or singing in a low tone to himself." During his 
annual rides to Poplar Forest, ninety miles distant, he was usually 
accompanied by his daughter or by one of her children ; and he often 
beguiled the tedium of the journey by singing an old song, alone or 
with his companion. His daughter, too, bad what Mr. Bacon calls 
tlie Jefferson temper, — all music and sunshine. In the twenty 
years of his service, he declares that he never once saw her in ill- 
bumor. She was nearly as tall as her father, he tells us, and had 
his bright, clear complexion and blue eyes ; and as she went about 
the house she seemed always in a happy mood, and was " nearly 
alwaj's humming a tune." The singularly sound health of the 
father was, no doubt, part of the secret of his festive existence. 
Mr. Bacon supplies another part of it : — 

" Mr. Jefferson was the most industrious person I ever saw in my 
life. All the time I was with him 1 had full permission to visit his 
room whenever I thought it necessary to see him on any business. 
I knew how to get into his room at any time of day or night. I 
have sometimes gone into his room when he was in bed ; but aside 
from that, I never went into it but twice, in the whole twenty years 
I was with him, that I did not find him employed. I never saw 
him sitting idle in his room but twice. Once he was suffering with 
the toothache ; and once, in returning from his Bedford farm, he 
had slept in a room where some of the glass had been broken out of 
the window, and the wind had blown upon him and given him a 
kind of neuralgia. At all other times he was either reading, writ- 
ing, talking, working upon some model, or doing something else. 
Mrs. Randolph was just like her father in this respect. She was 
always busy. If she wasn't reading or writing, she was always 
doing something. She used to sit in Mr. Jefferson's room a great 



694 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

dealj and sew, or read, or talk, as lie -would be busy about something 
else. As lier daughters grew up, she taught them to be industrious 
like herself. They used to take turns each day in giving out to the 
servants, and superintending the housekeeping." 

These children were eleven in number, six daughters and five 
sons ; to whom must be added Francis Eppes, a fine lad, the son of 
Maria Jefferson, to say nothing of a troop of schoolmates that one 
of the grandsons usually brought over from school at the next 
village, on Friday afternoons, to join in the sports of Saturday. 
Jefferson joined heartily in the pleasures of these children, but he 
was not the less a stickler for industry. 

Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph, the father of this numerous 
brood, was governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822. I have been 
favored by the Honorable Nicholas P. Trist with copies of sev- 
eral letters of Colonel Randolph, addressed to himself while he 
was a cadet in the military academy at West Point. They afford 
interesting glimpses of the mind so long and intimately associated 
with Mr. Jefferson's, and they show a spirit different indeed from 
that exhibited bj' Virginians of a later day. Here is a passage that 
exhibits the tone of feeling at Monticello with regard to slavery. 
Colonel Randolph writes thus to the cadet in November, 1818, con- 
cerning what he mildly terms " an accident " that had happened on 
a plantatioh not far from Monticello : — ■ 

" The overseer for next year had just taken his place, with great 
unwillingness on the part of the negroes, who were attached to the 
old one ; and their master would gladly have kept him at any salary 
in reason, but he had resolved on quitting business to go to his own 
farm. Several of the negroes gave so much displeasure, that they 
received punishment in the first days from the new commander ; 
among others, a very sensible, lively,, and likely young mulatto man, 
who, it seems, had seriously formed the resolution never to incur the 
punishment of stripes by any misconduct, and had, in consequence, 
become the most trustworthy among them according to the testimony 
of the neighborhood, being the one chosen to go on the road with 
the wagon always, to haul off grain and bring back supplies. The 
new overseer, however, could not understand the value of character 
in a slave, and concluded that fear would be safer security for good 



AT MONTICELLO. 695 

condupt, than any determination to do right, no matter how deliber- 
ately made, or how long persisted in, and near becoming a fixed 
habit. Power seldom reasons well. The young fellow received a 
few lashes on his bare back for some trifling misdemeanor. Leav- 
ing his tools in the field, it is said he hung himself twenty feet from 
the ground in a tree near his master's door the same night ; having 
first taken leave of all his companions, who did not think seriously 
enough of his threat to give the alarm, and who, perhaps, felt pleas- 
ure at the idea of his running away,. because the lost time would be 
an appeal to interest with the master and overseer on future occa- 
sions, manifestly in their favor. The bravery of this fellow seems 
to have left no room in his mind for such a thought. He had made 
a resolution ; and he marched intrepidly forward in the execution of 
it, despising pain and not knowing fear. 

" AVhat a hideous monster, among the various phenomena of the 
social state, is our Southern system ! Tyranny in the army is 
mitigated by the reflection that the brave have to submit to the 
brave only. But the greatest dastard might possibly have the 
feelings, moral and physical, as well as the comforts, of man}'' a 
brave man entirely in his power, and dependent upon his caprice. 
In this particular case, both master and overseer are humane men ; 
and the latter is of proven fortitude, as well as moral worth. The 
former you knovv^ and respect. 

"Long ago /have dismissed the man-whip from my slave manege. 
I find, however, that the cane of a corporal must be tolerated 3^et. 
But I always scrupulously distinguish, and exempt, manly and 
moral character, when it shows itself with any steadiness of ray in 
the sooty atmosphere of our slave discipline. And such exempts 
never suffer from me any other punishment than privations for little 
obliquities of conduct. I find use for all my thirty years' experi- 
ence, with whatever ingenuity it may have given rise to in the time, 
to keep up sufficient authority, without recurrence to the old mode 
of government. My only resource is to bring the culprit, if he be a 
man grown, and had ever displayed moral character at any time, 
before a magistrate by some contrivance, and to get punishment 
inflicted by a constable under legal forms. I have found confine- 
ment in the county-jail to have an admirable effect on my high-tem- 
pered men. And by magnifying a troublesome contumacy into 
incipient revolt, seasonably detected in the misconduct of an indi- 



696 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

vidual, I have always succeeded, without any difficulty, in lodging 
my own there. It convinces them that I do not regard the loss of 
their time ; which consideration, by gratifying their ill-humor, makes 
them often run away from many masters, very rarely from me, 
perhaps on account of what I have just mentioned. They know the 
jail to be the sure fate of runaways, and it is. not amiss that they should 
have a proper distaste for it. I am certain that I have not iu thirty 
years lost one month's work altogether by their running away." 

There are other passages in these letters that breathe a similar 
spirit. He descants in one letter upon Mr. Trist's choice of a mili- 
tary career, and favors him with a translation from the Greek that 
speaks well for his knowledge of the ancient tongue, and his skill iu 
the use of his own. 

"I see," wrote the governor in May, 1821, "no encouragement 
for a young man to embrace the military profession at this time, yet 
I sincerely hope the military science will be cultivated by our gov- 
ernment ; and I would, if I were in Congress, give my vote alwaj's 
to support the army as it has lately been, and to extend the nursery 
of officers, so absolutely necessary to its honorable existence, in a 
greater degree than has been hitherto contemplated. The doctrine 
of the Quakers is womanish, and their hope of making peace as 
fashionable forever as their dress is absolutely childish. It is the 
only tenet of theirs which I do not in some degree approve. My 
historical reading and observation of human nature forbid me to 
bear with them upon that point with any patience at all. I 
admire their steady industry, temperance, gravity of deportment, 
frugality, uniformity of manners, and a thousand other things ; but 
I cannot refrain from ridiculing their thoughtless censure of Nature 
for having given stings to bees, under the mistaken idea that any 
weapon at all was necessary to preserve to them the delicious fruits 
of their incessant toil in summer, upon the preservation of which 
their existence during winter depends ; besides the satisfaction of 
'producing (UjSTFORCEd), and the pleasure of enjoying, which insects, 
much more men, can never cease to feel. The use of arms would be 
necessary even in a perfectly insulated society; for without them the 
good would soon become the victims of the bad, Avho cannot be pre- 
vented from increasing their power of mischief by such means 



AT MONTICELLO. 697 

privately, if prolribited publicly, and the discovery would become too 
late for unarmed hands to avert the calamity. Menaonists would 
ever become the victims of terrorists, if not protected by those who 
are both brave and good, who defend peace because they love it. 

"Where stood the foremost rank, how fiiir they lie, 
The brave and good who for their country die. 
How wretched he who leaves his native fields 
To be<^ the bread a foreign harvest yields ! 
Wandering, with parents in the wane of life, 
With tender offspring, and a youthful wife; 
Despised by those the scanty boon who grant. 
Subdued by hateful penury and want; 
He stains his name, the manly form degrades. 
Low-minded vice the growing race pervades, 
A wretch like that no fear of shame assails; 
With him no hope of honored line prevails. 
The land and those we love let tts defend, 
Regardless when this anxious life may end. 
Yoimg men ! in firm array prepare to figlit; 
Unfelt be fear, disdained be shanieful flight ; 
Let mighty hearts beat high in bosoms strong ; 
Think not of life while in the hostile throng." 

[" Part of a translation from the Greek of Tyrtaeus, made during the late war 
by T. M. R., not a line of which was ever written before: indeed, the remainder is 
entirely forgotten, and not likely to be ever recalled."] 

These are agreeable passages, and show the brighter side of a 
strong and gifted mind. But at this very time, when public honors 
added distinction to his person and name, he was sutfering deeply 
from the bad system which he hated, and from which he had not 
strength to escape. Occasionally even he felt himself compelled to 
eke out the dwindling income of his estate by the sale of some of 
his slaves. His affairs were fatally disordered at length, and he 
became a bankrupt. 

Mr. Jefferson and his daughter enjoyed long intervals of tranquil 
happiness. But, living as he did in the midst of slavery, it was 
impossible for him to avoid his personal share of the harm it wrought 
to every creature in the United States, even to those who hated it 
most, and opposed it always ; for it made them intense and one- 
sided. He was an indulgent master, it is true ; and he never lost a 
sense of the folly of a system of labor, of which the laborer got 



698 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIT. 

most of the good, and the master nearly all the evil. " He did not 
like slavery," remarks Mr. Bacon. "I have heard him talk a great 
deal about it. He thought it a bad system. I have heard him 
prophesy that we should have just such trouble with it as we are 
having now, in 1862." And yet his lifelong contact with slavery 
appears to have lessened his ability to think rationally concerning 
it. Long he cherished the dream of colonization, and fancied he 
saw in Liberia the beginning of a movement that would deliver the 
negroes of America from slavery, and those of Africa from barbarism. 
He took it for granted that the two races could not live together, 
both being free. "We have the wolf by the ears," he wrote in 
1820, "and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice 
is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." 

When the question arose of extending the area of slavery over 
Missouri, he showed a strange blending of keenness and dulness of 
vision ; descrying the distant danger most clearly, as aged eyes are 
apt to do, but blind to the path immediatelj'- before him. " This 
momentous question," he wrote in April, 1820, "like a fire-bell in 
the night, awakened and filled me with terror." He thought it was 
"the knell of the Union." Since Bunker Hill, he said, we had never 
had so ominous a question ; and he thanked Heaven that he should 
not live to see the issue. We now know that his worst forebodings 
came short of the mighty sum-total of evil and calamity which his 
country was to endure : first, forty years of an ignoble strife of words, 
one side insolent and infuriate, the other insincere and timorous ; 
next, four years of carnage ; then ten of the beggar-on-horseback's 
demoralizing sway. But, with all this correctness of prophecy, the 
aged Jefferson thought the Northern members were wrong in wish- 
ing to keep slavery out of those lovely, fertile plains west of the 
Mississippi. He thought slavery would be weakened by being spread, 
and its final abolition made easier. Worse than this, he began to 
think it an evil for Southern youth to attend Northern colleges, 
" imbibing opinions and principles in discord with those of their own 
country ; " and he was far from discerning that the opposition in 
the Northern States to the extension of slavery had any basis of 
disinterested conviction. " The Hartford Convention men," he wrote 
in 1821, "have had the address, by playing on' the honest feelings 
of our former friends, to seduce them from their kindred spirits, and 
to borrow their weight into the Federal scale. Desperate of regain- 



AT MONTICELLO. 699 

ing power under political distinctions, tLey have adroitly wriggled 
into its seat under the auspices of morality, and are again in the 
ascendency from which their sins had hurled them." Much is to be 
allowed to seventy-eight years. But even at seventy-eight so fine 
an intelligence as his could not, even for a moment, have shrunk to 
these limits in an atmosphere congenial with it. To become capable 
of thus misinterpreting the course of events was part of his share 
of the penalty of slavery. 



CHAPTEE LXX. 

HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 

But bis conduct was wiser than his words ; for he spent all his 
declining years in a singularly persistent endeavor to introduce into 
Virginia the institutions of New England. When a man finds him- 
self a member of a community in which there is incorporp,ted some 
all-pervading evil, — like slavery in old Virginia, like ill-distributed 
wealth in Great Britain now, — there are two ways in which he can 
attack it. One way is to cry aloud and spare not ; place himself dis- 
tinctly in opposition to the evil ; show it no quarter ; and take the 
chance of being a martyr or a conqueror. There are times and 
places when this heroic system is the only one admissible. The 
other method of attack is to set on foot measures, the fair working 
of which will infuse such health and vigor into the sick body politic 
as will enable it, at length, to cast out the disease. Thus we see 
that Yale, Harvard, and the common school, have gone far toward 
rescuing the fine intelligence of New England from the blight of 
the Mathers and their hideous ideas ; and we see the cheap press 
and the workingmen's lyceums and unions of Great Britain about to 
break up entail, primogeniture, and the rich preserves of an exclu- 
sive army, navy, India, and church. In Virginia no other method 
but this was even possible to be attempted in Jefferson's time. If 
he had set free his slaves, and waged open war against slavery, he 
would not have improved their condition, nor mitigated the malady 
of which Virginia was dying. His slaves would have become vaga- 
bonds, and himself an object of commiseration and derision. He 
made no such Quixotic attempts to serve his State, but directed his 
efforts to the gradual removal of what he felt to be the all}'- and 
main support of all the evil in the universe, — ignorance. He 
made this his business during the last sixteen years of his life, 
700 



HIS LABOES TO PEOMOTE EDUCATION. 701 

and toiled at it as vigorous men toil for the ordinary objects of 
ambition. 

And happily, as in earlier days when the liberties of his country 
were menaced he had in Madison a confidential ally, gifted with a 
parliamentary talent which Nature had denied to himself; so now, 
when his object was to break up the great deep of Virginia ignorance, 
he found a most efficient and untiring co-operator in his friend, 
Joseph C. Cabell, a member of the Senate of Virginia. They 
entered into a holy alliance to bring their State up to the level de- 
manded by the age. What both had planned in the study, Cabell 
advocated in the legislature ; and when Cabell found the legislature 
unmanageable, Jefferson would come to his aid with one of his 
exhaustive, vote-changing letters, which would find its way into a 
Richmond newspaper, and then- go the rounds of the press. 

A part of the letters which passed between these lovers of their 
country have been published in an octavo of five hundred and 
twenty-eight pages ; and most of Jefferson's, long and elaborate as 
many of them are, were written when a page or two of manuscript 
cost him hours of painful exertion. Once in 1822, when Cabell had 
urged him to write a number of letters to influential gentlemen in 
aid of one of their schemes, he replied, " You do not know, my dear 
sir, how great is my physical inability to write. The joints of my 
right wrist and fingers, in consequence of an ancient dislocation, are 
become so stiffened, that I can write but at the pace of a snail. The 
copying our report and my letter lately sent to the governor, being 
seven pages only, employed me laboriously a whole week. The let- 
ter I am now writing you" (filling one large sheet) "has taken me 
two days. A letter of a page or two costs me a day of labor, and 
of painful labor." 

But some of these letters were among the best he ever wrote. In 
his endeavors to reconcile the people of Virginia to the cost of main- 
taining a common school in each " ward " of every county, he showed 
all his old tact and skill. His " ward " was to be "so laid oft' as to 
comprehend the number of inhabitants necessary to furnish a cap- 
tain's company of militia," — five hundred persons of all ages and 
either sex. The great difficulty was to convince the average planter 
that he, the rich man of the ward, had an interest in contributing 
to the common school, the teacher of which wag to receive a hundred 
and fifty dollars a year, and "board round." Jefferson met this 



702 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

objection in a letter that still possesses convincing power. And liis 
argument comes home to the inhabitants of the great cities now ris- 
ing everywhere, and destined to contain half of the population of 
this continent. What are they but a narrow rim of elegance and 
plenty around a vast and deep abyss of squalor, into which a certain 
portion of the dainty children of the smiling verge are sure to slide 
at last ? How eloquent are these quiet words of Jefferson, when we 
apply them to our own city! Would that I could give them wings 
that would carry round the world a passage so simple, so humane, so 
wise, and so adroit ! 

"And will the wealthy individual have no retribution? And 
what will this be? 1. The peopling his neighborhood with honest, 
useful, and enlightened citizens, understanding their own rights, and 
'firm in their perpetuation. 2. When his descendants become poor, 
which they generally do within three generations (no law of primo- 
geniture now perpetuating wealth in the same families), their chil- 
dren will be educated by the then rich ; and the little advance he 
now makes to poverty, while rich himself, will be repaid by the then 
rich to his descendants when become poor, and thus give them a 
chance of rising again. This is a solid consideration, and should go 
home to the bosom of ever}'^ parent. This will be seed sown in fertile 
ground. It is a.2yrovision for his family looking to distant times, 
and far in duration beyond that he has now in hand for them. Let 
every man count backwards in his own family, and see how many 
generations he can go, before he comes to the ancestor who made 
the fortune he now holds. Most will be stopped at the first genera- 
tion ; many at the second ; few will reach the third ; and not one 
in the State can go beyond the fifth." 

Like Franklin, he was not content with appealing only to the 
higher motives. State pride was a chord which he touched with 
effect. He reminded Virginians, that, before the Eevolution, the 
mass of education in Virginia placed her with the foremost of her 
sister colonies ; but now " the little we have we import, like beg- 
gars, from other States, or import their beggars to bestow on us 
their miserable crumbs." He pointed to Virginia's ancient friend 
and ally, Massachusetts, only one-tenth as large as Virginia, and 
the twenty-first state in the Union in size. But she has " more 



HIS LABOES TO PEOMOTE EDUCATION. 703 

influence in our confederacy than any 6th er State in it." Why? 
" From her attention to education unquestionably. There can be 
no stronger proof that knowledge is power and that ignorance is 
weakness." 

He did not live to see a State system of common schools estab- 
lished in Virginia. A scheme of his for maintaining in each 
county a circulating library was also in advance of that generation, 
and had no great results in his own day. 

But the two conspirators against ignorance had one memorable 
and glorious triumph. They succeeded in planting on Virginia soil 
a viniversity, unique in two particulars. In all other American 
colleges then existing, the controlling influence was wielded b}'' one 
of the lea,rned professions ; and all students were compelled to pur- 
sue a course of studies originally prescribed by that one pi'ofession 
for its own perpetuation. In the University of Virginia, founded 
through lihe influence and persistent tact of Jefferson, seconded at 
every stage by the zeal and ability of Cabell, all the professions are 
upon an equalit}', and every student is free to choose what knowl- 
edge he will acquire, and what neglect. It is a secularized univer- 
sity. Knowledge and scholarship are there neither rivals nor 
enemies, but equal and independent sources of mental power, invit- 
ing all, compelling none. Jefferson's intention was to provide an 
assemblage of schools and professors, where every student could find 
facilities for getting just what knowledge he wanted, without being 
obliged to pretend to pursue studies for which he had neither need 
nor taste. He desired, also, to test his favorite principle of trusting 
every individual to the custody of his own honor and conscience. 
It was his wish that students should stand on the simple footing of 
citizens, amenable only to the laws of their State and country, and 
that the head of the faculty should be a regularly commissioned 
magistrate, to sit in judgment on any who had violated those laws. 
This part of the scheme he was compelled, at a critical moment, to 
drop ; but he did so only to avoid .the peril of a more important 
failure. But he held to the principle. He would have no espionage 
upon the students ; but left all of them free to improve their oppor- 
tunities in their own way, provided the laws of the land were not 
broken, and the rights of others were respected. His trust was in 
the conscience and good sense of the students, in the moral influ- 
ence, of a superior corps of instructors, and in an elevated public 
opinion. 



704 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Jefferson was forty years in getting the University of Virginia 
establislied. Long he hoped that the ancient college of William 
and Mary could be freed from limiting conditions and influences, 
and be developed into a true university. As late as 1820 he was 
still striving for a " consolidation " of the old college with the form- 
ing institution in Albemarle. It was already apparent that the 
want of America was, not new institutions of learning, but a sup- 
pression of one-half of those already existing, aijd the "survival of 
the fittest," enriched by the spoils of the weak. But William and 
Mary, like most of the colleges of Christendom, is constricted by 
the ignorance and vanity of " benefactors," who gave their money 
to found an institution for all time, and annexed conditions to 
their gifts which were suited only to their own time. Nothing 
remained but to create a new institution. In 1794 a strange cir- 
cumstance occurred, which gave him hopes of attaining his object 
by a short cut. Several of the professors in the College of Geneva, 
Switzerland, dissatisfied with the political condition of their canton, 
united in proposing to Mr. Jefferson to remove in a body to Vir- 
ginia, and continue their vocation vmder the protection and patron- 
age of the legislature. On sounding influential members, he 
discovered that the project was premature, and it was not pressed. 
The coming of Dr. Priestley, followed by some learned friends 
of his and other men of science, revived his hopes. A letter to 
Priestley in 1800 shows that the great outlines of the scheme were 
then fully drawn in his mind. He told the learned exile that he 
desired to found in the centre of the State a "university on a plan 
so broad and liberal and modern as to be worth patronizing with 
the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other States 
to come and drink of the cup of knowledge, and fraternize with 
us." He proposed that the professors should follow no other call- 
ing; and he hoped " to draw from Europe the first characters in 
science hj considerable temptations." He asked Dr. Priestley to 
draw up a plan, and favor him with advice and suggestions. Dur- 
ing his presidency, he still embraced opportunities to increase his 
knowledge of such institutions. After his retirement, the war of 
1812 interposed obstacles^ but, from the peace of 1815 to the close 
of his life, the University of Virginia was the chief subject of his 
thoughts, and the chief object of his labors. 

It is not difficult to begin the most arduous enterprise. How 



HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 705 

many well-cut corner-stones lie buried in various parts of this conti- 
nent ! We excel in corner-stones. That was a glad and proud 
day for Albemarle when the corner-stone of the University of Vir- 
ginia was laid, witnessed by the three neighbors who filled in suc- 
cession the office of president of the United States, — Jefferson, 
Madison, Monroe, the last named being president at the time. 
But it had cost Jefferson some exercise of his tact to get the cor- 
ner-stone laid just there, within sight of his own abode. Other 
localities had, of course, their strenuous advocates. If a member 
of the commission raised an objection on the ground that other 
places were more salubrious, Jefferson would draw from liis pocket 
a list of persons past eighty then living in the neighborhood. But 
an institution built and supported by the common treasure should 
be central ! So it must. And Jefferson produced a card cut into 
the shape of Virginia, upon which the proposed site of the univer- 
sity was indicated by a dot. That the dot was very near the centre 
of the State could be shown by balancing the card on the point of 
a pencil. But a place may be geographically central without being 
near the centre of population. It may indeed. And Jefferson 
exhibited a piece of board representing Virginia, on which he had 
written, in his own clear, minute hand, the population of everj'' 
part of the State; which made it plain to the eye, that, if the popu- 
lation of Virginia had been called upon to revolve, Monticello was 
the very pivot for the purpose. In short, the corner-stone was laid 
where the master of Monticello could watch its rising glories from 
his portico, and ride over every day to the site, five miles distant. 

Then came the tug of war. He had subscribed a thousand dol- 
lars toward the fund, and his neighbors had multiplied that sum by 
forty- four. But the main reliance of the founder was upon the 
legislature of the State, not accustomed to appropriate money for 
such an object, nor able to appropriate much. Party passions were 
7iot extinct ; and if, with the majority, Jefferson was a name to 
conjure with, there was an influential minority who held him in 
undiminished'aversion. Virginia, too, was a declining commonwealth. 
Nothing was so abundant tliere as encumbered estates ; and many 
families, who held their heads high, were subsisting on the proceeds 
of the sale, now and then, of little girls and boys, or " likely " men 
and women. Money came hard ; and Jefferson wanted a great deal 
more of it to complete his plans than either he or the legislature 
45 



706 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

had anticipated. "I have been long sensible," he wrote in 1826, 
" that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest 
of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and pla- 
cing our rising generation on the level of our sister States (which 
they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious 
function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a 
patient insensible of needing it." He was, also, a connoisseur in 
architecture, which is not an inexpensive taste. He thought that 
it became Virginia to erect something grand and noble for an insti- 
tution that was to bear her name, and invite the flower of the j^outh 
of other States. Year after year Mr. Cabell had to renew the 
struggle in the legislature to get money to go on with. Three hun- 
dred thousand dollars were expended in all, and an appropriation 
of fifteen thousand dollars a year was made toward the support of 
the institution. The zeal of Cabell was contagious and irresistible. 
At one critical moment his feelings were wrought to such a pitch, 
that he dared not remain in the chamber while the vote was taken; 
and thus he missed a moving scene. The vote that day decided 
the location. As soon as the result was declared, Mr. B. G. Bald- 
win, the leader of the party opposed to placing the institution at 
Charlottesville, rose and made a powerful appeal in behalf of the 
university. He had contended strenuously for a more western site 
as long as there was auy hope of success ; but now that another 
place had been chosen, he conjured the western members to rise 
superior to local prejudices, and give the institution a cordial sup- 
port. " A great part of the House," reports Cabell, " were in 
'tears. Such magnanimity in a defeated adversary excited univer- 
sal applause." 

Mr. Jefferson had now secured the most fascinating occupation 
for his last years that could have been contrived for him. He was 
chairman of the board of trustees ; and they all seemed to agree 
with Mr. Madison when he remarked at one of their first meetings, 
" This is Mr. Jefferson's scheme ; the responsibility is his ; and it is 
but fair that he should be allowed to carry it out in his own way." 
Jefferson's love of construction, his ingenuity as an inventor, his 
interest in science, his patriotism and benevolence, were all gratified 
in superintending the formation of the university. Colonel T. J. 
Eandolph has described in a vivid and agreeable manner the joyous 
activity of his grandfather at this time, — how he would mount his 



HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 707 

horse early in the morning, canter down the mountain and across 
the country to the site, and spend a long day there in assisting- at 
the work ; carrying with him a walking-stick of his own invention 
(now familiar to all), composed of three sticks, which, being spread 
out and covered witha piece of cloth, made a tolerable seat. He it 
was who designed the plan and made working-draughts for each 
detail. He engaged workmen, selected timber, and bought bricks. 
Carvers of stone whom he caused to be brought from Italy settled 
in the county, and have living descendants there at this moment. 
Afterwards, finding his ornate capitals could be cut cheaper in Italy, 
he had them executed there. It was his object to exhibit to the 
future students specimens of all the orders of architecture, and edi- 
fices that should call to mind seyeral of the ancient triumphs of his 
favorite art. Occupants of the buildings, it is said, would prefer 
less grandeur and more convenience, fewer columns and more, closets. 
The time came for selecting professors. The very first appoint- 
ment brought ia storm about his ears. One of the fugitives from the 
re-action in European politics of 1793 was Thomas Cooper, a friend 
of Priestley and a gentleman of note in chemistry and other 
branches of natural science. Under the Sedition Law, for a harm- 
less paragraph upon President Adams, after a trial in which Judge 
Chase had not kept up even a decent show of impartiality, the 
accused was sentenced to pay a fine of four hundred dollars, and to 
•be imprisoned six months. Of course he was a made man from the 
moment of the ascendency of the Republican party. As he was 
reputed to be the first chemist in the United States, the visitors 
innocently invited him to the chair of chemistry in the new univer- 
sity. Four States were competing for his services. New York, 
through De Witt Clinton, offered him liberal compensation for that 
time, — twenty-five hundred dollars a year and fees. Pennsylvania 
sought him for the university in Philadelphia, offering him a place 
worth seven thousand a year. New Orleans had invited him, and 
William and Mary desired him. But when it became known that 
he had decided for Jefferson and the University of Virginia, the 
slumbering fury of the year 1800 blazed up again, and an outcry 
arose so violent as to threaten the existence of a university depend- 
ent upon the popular will. It was remembered, too, that Dr. 
Cooper was a Unitarian, a name of opprobrium even at a time so 
recent. This was, indeed, a serious consideration ; for a religious 



708 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFBESON". 

prejudice was then one of those blind, resistless forces whicli were 
no more amenable to reason than an earthquake or a tornado. 
There is nothing to be done in the presence of a convulsion of 
nature but to get out of its way. And it really was of the very 
first necessity to avoid the appearance of using the university as a 
means of propagating peculiar opinions. Jefferson bent to a storm 
he could not brave, and relinquished Cooper to one of the other 
institutions that desired him. It was a happy riddance. South 
Carolina obtained him at last, and made a nullifier of him in 1832. 
>i A competent corps of professors were engaged in England ; and 
in March, 1825, the universit}^ was opened with forty students, a 
number which was increased to one hundred and twenty-three before 
the end of the first term, and to one hundred and seventy-seven at 
the beginning of the second year. 

The institution differs from other American colleges in these partic- 
ulars : there is no president ; all the professors are of equal rank, 
except that one of their number is elected chairman of the faculty, 
and performs the usual representative duties. They get_ from the 
ufiiversity a small fixed salary, meant to be sufficient for subsist- 
ence. Besides this, every professor receives a small fee from each of 
the students attending his " school." There are no rewards given 
by the university and no honors, except a statement of the student's 
proficiency in each of the ''schools" which he attends; and that 
liroficiency is ascertained, not by a system of daily marks, but by an 
examination which is intended to be thorough and just. " Gradua- 
tion " signifies only that a student has acquitted himself well in one 
of the "groups" of schools. A great point is made of the exami- 
nations. " Rigorous written examinations," Dr. Charles Venable, 
the chairman of the faculty, has recently written, " are held period- 
ically in each school, and the diploma of the school is conferred on 
those students only whose examination-papers come up to a fixed 
standard. That is, the candidate for graduation must obtain four- 
fifths (in some of the schools three-fourths) of the values assigned 
to the questions set in the examinations. No distinctions are made 
among the graduates. A student either graduates cum laude or 
not at all. In the lower classes of the schools like examinations are 
held, and certificates of distinction given to those who come up to 
the standard of three-fourths of the values of the questions' set." 
Another peculiarity of this institution is the homage it pays to 



HIS LABOES TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 709 

religion. This is unique. In other colleges it is assumed that 
students will neither go to church nor attend prayers unless they 
are compelled to do so. This university, on the contrary, assumes 
that religion ha5 an attractive power of its own, and leaves it to each 
student to go to church and attend prayers, or to abstain from so 
doing. Daily prayers are held, and a service on Sunday is conducted 
by a clergyman of the vicinit}'-, elected in rotation from the chief 
denominations of the State ; and he is maintained by the voluntary 
contributions of the inmates of the university. But the dishonor 
is not put upon him of compelling attendance at his ministrations. 
Dr. Venable states that the results of this system of freedom are 
such as might have been expected. " The students," he says, " con- 
tribute with commendable liberality to the support of the chaplain, 
who goes constantly in and out among them as their friend and 
brother, laboring earnestly in the promotion of Christian activity 
and all good works. There is always a respectable attendance of 
student worshippers at morning prayers, a good attendance of 
students in the Sunday services in the chapel as well as in the 
churches in the town. There is an earnest Christian activity among 
the students, which employs itself in the different enterprises of the 
University Young Men's Christian Association. They keep up six 
Sunday schools in the sparsely-settled mountain districts of the 
neighborhood, — five for whites and one for freedmen, with an aver- 
age attendance on each of thirty pupils. This steady Christian activ- 
ity is not a thing of to-day or yesterday, but it has been the rule 
for years." 

Dr. Venable bears explicit testimony also to the happy results of 
Mr. Jefferson's darling system of trusting the students, instead of 
spying them. " I have seen," he says, "the plan of trusting to the 
students' honor, and of the abolition of all espionage, tested here and 
in the University of South Carolina. It has also been adopted in 
most of the Virginia colleges with the best results. Its eftects in 
imbuing the body of the students with the spirit of truth and 
candor, in giving them the proper scorn for a lie, and in promoting a 
frank and manly intercourse between the students and professors, 
cannot be too highly estimated. A student who is known to have 
been guilty of a violation of his examination pledge, or of any other 
falsehood in his dealings with the authorities, — things of rare occur- 
rence, — is not permitted by his fellows to remain in the institution." 



710 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

It is also his opinion, that the university has signally answered 
the great design of. its founder, which was to raise the standard of 
liberal education in Virginia. The mere fact of keeping its diplomas, 
so far as is possible to human scrutiny, free froid falsehoods, and 
issuing no diplomas of the kind called honorary, has had a percepti- 
ble effect, he thinks, in restoring to parchment a portion of the 
power it once had to confer honorable distinction. 

Like all other institutions of learning in the Southern States, it 
was subjected to a most severe ordeal during the late war. The 
number of students had gone on increasing from year to year, until 
it had reached an average of six hundred and fifty. Then came the 
rude blast of war, which a Southern student must have been much 
more or something less than human, not to have obeyed. Abstract 
truth is usually powerless when father, mother, sisters, brothers, 
friends, and neighbors are all pulling the other way. Hundreds of 
alumni (the strength of a university) fell in battle, never doubting 
that they died for their country and their rights. But during the 
whole of the four years' struggle, the university was kept open, and 
only once did the war come near it. In March, 1865, General Sher- 
idan was at Charlottesville with a body of cavalry ; but during the 
few daj's of his stay in the neighborhood he placed guards around 
the grounds of the university, and preserved its property uninjured. 
For the first two or three years after the peace, education being in 
arrears, and the people, it is said, more hopeful than they are now, 
the number of students was again nearly five hundred. The Cata- 
logue for 1872 shows three hundred and sixty-five. Virginia, besides 
bearing up under a great load of debt, has nobly continued the 
annual appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars ; and two citizens 
of the State, Samuel Miller and Thomas Johnson, have recently 
given one hundred and forty thousand dollars to found a department 
of incfustrial chemistry and engineering. 

The present effort of the visitors is to strengthen and widen the 
basis of the university by an endowment of half a million. That 
peculiar friendship which once existed between Virginia and Massa- 
chusetts, dating back to the time when Massachusetts was stricken 
in her chief industry, and Virginia was her bountiful helper and con- 
solation, seems to live again in the late exchange of courtesies between 
the president of Harvard and the chairman of the faculty of the 
University of Virginia. " I hope," says Dr. Venable, " the many 



HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 711 

friends and benefactors of Harvard will wisely concentrate on her 
the means of fulfilling all her high aspirations." Massachusetts, 
with her capital to rebuild, and her Harvard to restore, must deny 
herself at present many pleasures which she would otherwise enjoy. 
New York will, perhaps, treat herself to the gift of this half million. 
It is a pleasing evidence of the advance of catholicity of feeling, 
that Henry Ward Beecher, the representative liberal of the North- 
ern States, the son of a Calvinist and a Federalist, himself always 
an Abolitionist, should have contributed a thousand dollars to the 
fund. 

The great thing to be desired in the higher education of America 
is the union of several colleges in each State to form one or 
two real universities. But probably this can only be done by 
Nature's own method of strengthening the strong and starving the 
weak. This university, from the day when Jefferson gave it life, 
has shown a lusty strength, that marks it as one of the " fittest " 
which are destined to " survive." 

During these last years Mr. Jefferson showed in many other ways 
that the best solace of declining age is an intelligent and benevolent 
mind. He watched with deep concern the ceaseless movement of 
the human soul toward freedom and purity. Dr. Channing became 
an interesting figure to him ; and he hailed with delight the inroads 
which Channing appeared to be making in what he considered the 
most pernicious of all priestly devices, the theology of Calvin. It is 
hard to say which surpassed the other in boiling hatred of Calvin- 
ism, Jefferson or John Adams. " I rejoice," writes Jefferson in 
1822, ''that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which 
has surrendered its creed and conscience neither to kings nor priests, 
the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving; and I trust there 
is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die 
a Unitarian." He was ever the most sanguine of men. Often, at 
tliis period, he spoke of the ancient doctrines with an approach to 
violence. In thanking Colonel Pickering for sending him one .of 
Dr. Channing's sermons, he wrote thus : " No one sees with greater 
pleasure than myself the progress of reason in its advances toward 
rational Cliristianity. When we shall have done away with the 
incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are 
one, and one is three ; when we shall have knocked down the artifi- 
cial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of 
47 



712 LD^E OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

Jesus ; when, in short, we shall have unlearned every thing taught 
since his day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he 
inculcated, — we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples ; and 
my opinion is, that, if nothing had ever been added to what flowed 
purely from his lips, the whole world would at this day have been 
Christian. . . . Had there never been a commentator, there never 
would have been an infidel." 

He became even more vehement than this after his eightieth year. 
He spoke of "the blasphemous absurdity of the five points of Cal- 
vin ; " of " the hocus-pocus phantasm of a God " created hy Calvin, 
which, " like ailother Cerberus," had " one body and three heads ; " 
and declared, that, in his opinion, "it would be more pardonable to 
believe in no God at all than to blaspheme him by the atrocious 
attributes of Calvin." Hence his joy at the triumphs of the young 
Boston preacher whose boldness aud fervor, he heard, were setting 
free so many human minds from the iron bondage of the past. "In 
Boston and its neighborhood," he writes exultingly to Dr. Cooper, 
" Unitarianism has advanced to so great strength as now to humble 
this haughtiest of all religious sects, the Presbyterian ; inasmuch as 
they condescend to interchange with them and the other sects the 
civilities of preaching freely and frequently in each other's meeting- 
houses." But other parts of the country, he owned, were far less 
enlightened, a threatening cloud of fanaticism being over them, 
" lighter in some parts, denser in others, but too heavy in all." ''In 
Bhode Island no sectarian preacher will permit a Unitarian to pol- 
lute his desk. In our Richmond there is much fanaticism, but chiefly 
among the women. They have their night meetings and praying 
parties where, attended by their priests, and some times by a hen- 
pecked husband, tliey pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus, 
in terms as amatory and carnal as their modesty would permit them 
to use to a mere earthly lover. In our village of Charlottesville 
there is a good degree of religion with a small spice only of fanati- 
cism. We have four sects, but without either church or meeting- 
house. The court-house is the common temple, one Sunday in the 
month to each. Here Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Methodist 
and Baptist, meet together, join in hjnnning their Maker, listen with 
attention and devotion to each other's preachers, and all mix in 
society with perfect harmony." The final and comjilete remedy, he 
thought, for the '• fever of fanaticism " was the diffusion of knowl- 



HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 713 

edge ; and again he indulges his sanguine humor by predicting 
that " Unitarianism will, ere long, be the religion of the majority, 
from north to south." 

In matters political he remained to the last what he was in 1800. 
He could not relish Scott's novels, because they concealed, as he 
thought, the ugly truth of the past under an alluring guise of the 
romantic and picturesque. He disliked the robber Norman, loved 
the industrial Saxon. As for Hume's History of England, and 
Blackstone's Commentaries, he never ceased to hate them. "They 
have made Tories," he wrote, " of all England, and are making Tories 
of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do 
not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blafck- 
stone. These two books, but especially the former, have done more 
towards the suppression of the liberties of man than all the million 
of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with 
the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment-seat 
of his Maker." He said, too, that, while he feared nothing for our 
liberty from the assaults of force, he had fears of the influence of 
English books, English prejudices, English manners, and their apes 
and dupes among professional men. He remained a free-trader to 
the end. , The longer he lived the more he felt the necessity of ja 
subdivision of territory, like the town-system of New England, under 
which each citizen belongs to a small body of voters, with whom he 
can conveniently co-operate, and who can be assembled without delay 
or difficulty. He would have divided a city of the size of New York 
into three hundred wards. He also became perfectly aware of the 
truth, since demonstrated in so many ways and places, that universal 
suffrage, where a majority of the voters are grossly ignorant, tends 
to put the scoundrel at the summit of affairs. In commenting upon 
a new constitution proposed for Spain, he said there was one provision 
in it " which would immortalize its inventors." That provision dis- 
franchised every, man, who, after a certain epoch, could not read and 
write. 



CHAPTER LXXL 

VISITORS AT MONTICELLO, AND FAMILY REMINISCENCES. 

The reader may naturally desire to linger a moment longer upon 
the summit of the little mount, where, for the long period of sixty 
years, such a joyous, intelligent, and dignified life was lived. 
Among the visitors who thronged thither during the last years of 
Mr. Jefferson's life were several persons of note who recorded their 
recollections. Mr. Randall has gathered from surviving descendants 
of the family many pleasing reminiscences, and from them also I 
will borrow a trait or two. 

RECOLLECTIONS OF A GRAND-DAUGHTER. 

Books were at all times his chosen companions, and his acquaint- 
ance with many languages gave him great power of selection. He 
read Homer, Virgil, Dante, Corneille, Cervantes, as he read Sliak- 
speare and Milton. In his youth he had loved poetry ; but, by the 
time I was old enough to observe, he had lost his taste for it, except 
for Homer and the great Athenian tragics, which he continued to the 
last to enjoy. He went over the works of ^schylus, Sophocles, and 
Euripides not very long before I left him (the year before his death). 
Of history he was very fond ; and this he studied in all languages, 
though always, I think, preferring the ancients. In fact, he derived 
more pleasure from his acquaintance with Greek and Latin than 
from any other resource of literature ; and I have often heard him 
express his gratitude to his father for causing him to receive a classi- 
cal education. I saw him more frequently with a volume of the 
classics in his hand than with any other book. Still he read new 
publications as they came out, never missed the new number of a 
7U 



VISITOES AT MONTICELLO. ' 71l 

review, especially of the Edinburgli, and kept himself acquainted 
with what was being done, said, or thought in the world from which 
lie had retired. 

He loved farming and gardening, the fields, the orchards, and his 
asparagus-beds. Every day he rode through his plantation and 
walked in his garden. In the cultivation of the last he took great 
pleasure. Of flowers, too, he was \evy fond. One of my early recol- 
lections is of the attention which he paid to his flower-beds. He 
kept up a correspondence with persons in the large cities, particu- 
larly, I think, in Philadelphia, for the purpose of receiving supplies 
of roots and seeds both for his kitchen and flower garden. I remem- 
ber well, when he first returned to Monticello, how immediately he 
began to prepare new beds for his flowers. He had these beds laid 
off on the lawn, under the windows ; and many a time I have run 
after him when he went out to direct the work, accompanied by one 
of his gardeners, generally Wormley, armed with spade and hoe, 
while he himself carried the measuring-line. 

I was too young to aid him, except in a small way ; but my sister, 
• Mrs. Bankhead, then a young and beautiful woman, was his active 
and useful assistant. I remember the planting of the first hyacinths 
and tulips, and their subsequent growth. The roots arrived labelled, 
each one with a fancy name. There was "Marcus Aurelius" and 
the "King of the Gold Mine," the "Roman Empress" and the 
"Queen of the Amazons," "Psyche," the "God of Love," &c. 
Eagerly, and with childish delight, I studied this brilliant nomen- 
clature, and wondered what strange and surprisingly beautiful crea- 
tions I should see arising from the ground when spring returned ; 
and these precious roots were committed to the earth under my 
grandfather's own eye, with his beautiful grand-daughter Anne 
standing by his side, and a crowd of happy young faces, of j'ounger 
grandchildren, clustering round to see the progress, and inquire anx- 
iously the name of each separate deposit. 

Then, when spring returned, how eagerly we watched the first 
appearance of the shoots above ground ! Each root was marked 
with its own name written on a bit of stick by its side ; and what 
joy it was for one of us to discover the tender green breaking through 
the mould, and run to grandpapa to announce that we really believed 
Marcus Aurelius was coming up, or the Queen of the Amazons was 
above ground ! With how much pleasure, compounded of our pleas- 



716 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

ure and his own, on the new birth, he would immediately go out to 
verify the fact, and praise us for our diligent watchfulness. 

Then, when the flowers were in bloom, and we were in ecstasies 
over the rich purple and crimson, or pure white, or delicate lilac, or 
pale yellow of the blossoms, how he would sympathize with our 
admiration, or discuss vA-itli my mother and elder sister new group- 
ings and combinations and contrasts ! Oh, these were happy 
moments for us and for him ! 

It was in the morning, immediately after our early breakfast, that 
he used to visit his flower-beds and his garden. As the day, in 
summer, grew warmer, he retired to his own apartments, which con- 
sisted of a bed-chamber and libi'ary opening into each other. Here 
he remained until about one o'clock, occupied in reading, writing, 
looking over papers, &c. My mother would sometimes send me with 
a message to liim. A gentle knock, a call of " Come in," and I would 
enter, with a mixed feeling of love and reverence, and some pride in 
being the bearer of a communication to one whom I approached with 
all the affection of a child, and something of the loyalty of a subject. 
Our mother educated all her children to look up to her father, as" 
she looked up to him herself, — literally looked up, as to one stand- 
ing on an eminence of greatness and goodness. And it is no small 
proof of his real elevation, that as we grew older, and better able to 
judge for ourselves, we were more and more confirmed in the opin- 
ions we had formed of it. 

AXOTHER grand-daughter's RECOLLECTIONS. 

Cheerfulness, love, benevolence, wisdom, seemed to animate his 
whole form. His face beamed with them. You remember how 
active was his step, how lively and even playful were his manners. 

I cannot describe the feelings of veneration, admiration, and love 
that existed in my heart towards him. I looked on him as a being 
too great and good for my comprehension ; and yet I felt no fear to 
approach him, and be taught by him some of the childish sports that 
I delighted in. When he walked in the garden, and would call the 
children to go with him, we raced after and before him, and we were 
made perfectly happy by this permission to accprnpan^' him. Not 
one of us in our wildest moods ever placed a foot on one of the gar- 
den bedsj for that would violate one of his rules ; and yet I never 



VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 717 

heard liim ntter a harsh word to one of us, or sjieak in a raised tone 
of voice, or use a throat. He simply said, "Do," or "Do not." He 
wouhl gather fruit for us, seek out the ripest figs, or bring down the 
cherries from on high above our heads with a long stick, at the end 
of which there was a hook and a little net bag. . . . One of our 
earliest amusements was in running races on the terrace, or around 
the lawn. He placed us according to our ages, giving the 3'oungest 
and smallest the start of all the others by some 3'ards, and so on ; 
and then he raised his arm high with his white handkerchief in his 
hand, on which our eager eyes were fixed, and slowly counted three, 
at which number he dropped the handkerchief and we started off to 
finish the race by returning to the starting-place and receiving our 
reward of dried fruit, — three figs, prunes, or dates to the victor, two 
to the second, and one to the lagger who came in last. These were 
our summer sports with him. 

I was born the year he was elected president ; and except one 
winter that we spent with him in Washington, I never was with 
him during that season until after he had retired from office. Dur- 
ing his absences, all the children who could write corresponded with 
him. Their letters were duly answered ; and it was a sad mortifica- 
tion to me that I had not learned to write before his return to live 
at home, and of course had no letter from him. Whenever an 
opportunity occurred, he sent us books ; and he never saw a little 
story or piece of poetry in a newspaper suited to our ages and tastes, 
that he did not preserve it and send it to us ; and from him we 
learned the habit of making these miscellaneous collections by past- 
ing in a little paper book, made for the purpose, any thing of the 
sort that we i-eceived from him or got otherwise. 

On winter evenings, when it grew too dark to read, in the half- 
hour that passed before candles came in, as we all sat round the fire, 
he taught us several childish games, and would play them with us. 
I remember that " cross questions," and " I love my love with an A," 
were two I learned from him ; and we would teach some of ours to 
him. When the candles were brought, all was quiet immediately, 
for he took up his book to read, and we would not speak out of a 
whisper lest we should disturb him ; and generally we followed his 
example and took a book ; and I have seen him raise his eyes from 
his own book, and look round on the little circle of readers, and smile, 
and make some remark to mamma about it. When the snow fell we 



718 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

woulJ go out as soon as it stopped to clear it off the terraces with 
shovels, that he might have his usual walk on them without tread- 
ing in snow. 

He often made us little presents. I remember his giving us 
"Parents' Assistant;" and that we drew lots, and that she who drew 
the longest straw had the first reading of the book, the next 
longest straw entitled the drawer to the second reading, the short- 
est, to the last reading and the ownership of the book. Often he 
discovered, we knew not how, some cherished object of our desires; 
and the first intimation we had of his knowing the wish was its 
unexpected gratification. 

REMINISCENCES OF ANOTHER GRAND-DAUGHTER. 

My grandfather's manners to us, his grandchildren, were delight- 
ful. I can characterize them by no other word. He talked with us 
freely, affectionately, never lost an opportunity of giving a pleasure 
or a good lesson. He reproved without wounding us, and commended 
without making us vain. He took pains to correct our errors and 
false ideas, checked the bold, encouraged the timid, and tried to 
teach us to reason soundly and feel rightly. Our smaller follies he 
treated witli good-humored raillery, our graver ones with kind and 
serious admonition. He was watchful over our manners, and called 
our attention to every violation of propriety. He did not interfere 
with our education, technically so called, except by advising us what 
studies to pursue, what books to read, and by questioning us on the 
books which we did read. I was . . . thrown most into compan- 
ionship with him. I loved him very devotedly'', and sought every 
opportunity of being with him. As a child I used to follow him 
about, and draw as near to him as I could. I remember when I was 
small enough to sit on his knee and play with his watch-chain. As 
a girl I would join him in his walks on the terrace, sit with him 
over the fire during the winter twilight, or by the open windows in 
summer. As a child, girl, and woman, I loved and honored him 
above all earthly beings. And well I might. From him seemed to 
flow all the pleasures of my life. To him I owed all the small bless- 
ings and jox'ful surprises of my childish and girlish years. His nature 
was so eminently sympathetic, that, with those he loved, he could 
enter into their feelings, anticipate their wishes, gratify their tastes, 



VISITOES AT MONTICELLO. 719 

and surround tllem with an atmosphere of affection. I was fond of 
riding, and was rising above that childish simplicity when, provided 
I was mounted on a horse, I cared nothing for my equipments, and 
when an old saddle or broken bridle were matters of no moment. 
I was beginning to be fastidious, but I had never told my wishes. I 
was standing one bright day in the portico, when a man rode up to 
the door with a beautiful lady's saddle and bridle before him. My 
heart bounded. These coveted articles were deposited at my feet. 
My grandfather came out of his room to tell me they were mine. 

When about fifteen j^ears old, I began to think of a watch, but 
knew the state of my father's finances promised no such indulgence. 
One afternoon the letter-bag was brought in. Among the letters 
was a small packet addressed to my grandfather. It had the Phila- 
delphia mark upon it. I looked at it with indifferent, incurious eye. 
Three hours after, an elegant ladj^'s watch with chain and seals was 
in my hand, which ti'embled for very joy. IMy Bible came from him, 
my Shakspeare, mj first writing-table, my first handsome writing- 
desk, my first Leghorn hat, my first silk dress. "What, in short, of 
all my small treasures did not come from him ? . . . . 

]My sisters, according to their wants and tastes, were equally 
thought of, equally provided for. Our. grandfather seemed to read 
our hearts, to see our invisible wishes, to be our good genius, to 
wave the fairy wand, to brighten our young lives by his goodness 
and his gifts. But I have written enough for tliis time ; and, 
indeed, what can I say hereafter but to repeat the same tale of love 
and kindness ? 

VISIT OF LIEUTENANT FKANCIS HALL, OF THE BRITISH ARMY, 

IN 1817. 

" Having an introduction to Mr. Jefferson, I ascended his little 
mountain on a fine morning, which gave the situation its due effect. 
The whole of the sides and base are covered with forest, through 
which roads have been cut circularly, so that the winding may be 
shortened at pleasure ; the summit is an open lawn, near to the 
south side of which the house is built, with its garden just descend- 
ing the brow ; the saloon, or central hall, is ornamented with several 
pieces of antique sculpture, Indian arms, mammoth bones, and other 
curiosities collected from various parts of the Union. I found Mr. 



720 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

Jefferson tall in person, but stooping and lean witli old age ; thus 
exhibiting the fortunate mode of bodily decay, which strips the frame 
of its most cumbersome parts, leaving it still strength of muscle and 
activity of limb. His deportment was exactly such as the Marquis 
de Chastellux describes it above thirty years ago. 'At first serious, 
nay, even cold,' but in a very short time relaxing into a most agree- 
able amenity, with an unabated flow of conversation on the most 
interesting topics, discussed in the most gentlemanly and philosophic 
manner. I walked with him round his grounds, to visit his pet trees 
and improvements of various hinds. During the walk he pointed out 
to my observation a conical mountain, rising singly at the edge of 
the southern horizon of the landscape : its distance, he said, was 
forty miles, and its dimensions those of the greater Egyptian jDj^ra- 
mid; so that it accurately represents the appearance of the pja-amid 
at the same distance. There is a small cleft visible on its summit, 
through which the true meridian of Monticello exactly passes : its 
most singular property, however, is, that on different occasions it 
looms, or alters its appearance, becoming sometimes cylindrical, 
sometimes square, and sometimes assuming the form of an inverted 
cone. Mr. Jefferson had not been able to connect this phenomenon 
with any particular season, or state of the atmosphere, except that it 
most commonly occurred in the forenoon. He observed that it was 
not only whollj'- unaccounted for by the laws of vision, but that it 
had not as yet engaged the attention of philosophers so far as to 
acquire a name ; that of looming being, in fact, a term applied by 
sailors to appearances of a similar kind at sea. The Blue Mountains 
are also observed to loom, though not in so remarkable a degree. 

" It must be remarkable to recall and preserve the political senti- 
ments of a man who has held so distinguished a station in public life 
as Mr. Jefferson, He see.med to consider much of the freedom and 
happiness of America to rise from local circumstances. ' Our pop- 
ulation,' he observed, 'has an elasticitj^ by which it would fly off 
from oppressive taxation.' He instanced the beneficial eftects of a 
free government in the case of New Orleans, where many proprie- 
tors who were in a state of indigence under the dominion of Spain 
have risen to sudden wealth, solely by the rise in the value of land 
which followed a change of government. Their ingenuity in 
mechanical inventions, agricultural improvements, and that mass of 
general information to be found among Americans of all ranks and 



VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 7!l 

conditions, he ascribed to that ease of circumstances which affordel 
them leisure to cultivate their minds, after the cultivation of thei; 
lands was completed. In fact, I have frequently been surprised to 
find mathematical and other useful works in houses which seemed 
to have little pretensions to the luxury of learning. ' Another cause,' 
Mr. Jefferson observed, 'might be discovered in the many court and 
county meetings which brought men frequently together on public 
business, and thus gave them habits, both of thinking, and express- 
ing their thoughts on subjects, which in other countries are confined 
to the privileged few.' Mr. Jefferson has not the reputation of being 
very friendly to England: we should, however, be aware that a par- 
tiality in this respect is not absolutely the duty of an American 
citizen ; neither is it to be expected that the policy of our govern- 
ment should be regarded in foreign countries with the complacency 
with which, it is looked upon by ourselves; but, whatever may be his 
sentiments in this respect, politeness naturally repressed any offen- 
sive expression of them : he talked of our affairs with candor, and 
apparent good will, though leaning perhaps to the gloomier side of 
the picture. He did not perceive by what means we could be extri- 
cated from our present financial embarrassments, without some kind 
of revolution in our government. On my replying that our habits 
were remarkably steady, and that great sacrifices would be made to 
prevent a violent catastrophe, he acceded to the observation, but 
demanded if those who made the sacrifices would not require some 
political reformation in return. His repugnance was strongly 
marked to the despotic principles of Bonapartfe ; and he seemed to 
consider France under Louis XVI. as scarcely capable of a repub- 
lican form of government, but added that the present generation of 
Frenchmen had grown up with sounder notions, which would proba- 
bly lead to their emancipation. 

" Mr. Jefferson preferred Botta's Italian History of the American 
Revolution to any that had yet appeared ; remarking, however, the 
inaccuracy of the speeches. Indeed, the true history of that period 
seems to be generally considered as lost. A remarkable letter on this 
point lately appeared in print from the venerable Mr. John Adams, 
to a Mr. Niles, who had solicited his aid to collect and publish a 
body of revolutionary speeches. He says, ' Of all the speeches made 
in Congress from 1774 to 1777, inclusive of both years, not one sen- 
tence remains, except a few periods of Dr. Witherspoon, printed ia 
46 



72 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

hi, works.' His concluding sentence is very strong. ' In plain 
Biglish, and in a few words, Mr. Niles, I consider the true history 
of the American Kevolution, and the establishment of our present 
Constitutions, as lost forever ; and nothing hut misrepresentations, or 
partial accounts of it, will ever be recovered.' 

"I slept a night at Monticello, and left it in the morning with 
such a feeling as the traveller quits the mouldering remains of a 
Grecian teraplQ, or the pilgrim a fountain in the desert. It would 
indeed argue a great torpor, both of understanding and heart, to have 
looked without veneration and interest on the man who drew up the 
Declaration of American Independence ; who shared in the councils 
by wliich her freedom was established; whom the unbought voice of 
his fellow-citizens called to the exercise of a dignity from which his 
own moderation impelled him, when such an example was most 
salutary, to withdraw ; and who, while he dedicates the evening of 
his glorious days to the pursuits of science and literature, shuns none 
of the humbler duties of private life; but, having filled a seat high- 
er than that of kings, succeeds with graceful dignity to that of the 
good neighbor, and becomes the friendly adviser, lawj'er, and physi- 
cian, and even gardener, of his vicinity. This is the still small voice 
of philosophy, deeper and holier than the lightnings and earthquakes 
which have preceded it." 

VISIT OF DANIEL WEBSTER IN 1824. 

"Mr. Jefferson is now between eighty-one and eighty-two, above 
six feet high, of an ample, long frame, rather thin and spare. His 
head, which-is not peculiar in its shape, is set rather forward on his 
shoulders ; and his neck being long, there is, when he is walking or 
conversing, an habitual protrusion of it. It is still well covered with 
hair, which having been once red, and now turning gray, is of an 
indistinct sandy-color. 

" His eyes are small, very light, and now neither brilliant nor 
striking. His chin is rather long, but not pointed. His nose small, 
regular in its outline, and the nostrils a little elevated. His mouth 
is well formed, and still filled with teeth : it is strongly compressed, 
bearing an expression of contentment and benevolence. His com- 
plexion, formerly light and freckled, now bears the marks of age and 
cutaneous affection. His limbs are uncommonly long, his hands 



VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 723 

and feet very large, and his wrists of an extraordinary size. His 
walk is not precise and military, but easy and swinging. He stoops 
a little, not so much from age as from natural formation. When 
sitting, he appears short, partly from a rather lounging habit of sit- 
ting, and partly from the disproportionate length of his limbs. 

" His dress when in the house is a gray surtout coat, kerseymere- 
stuff waistcoat, with an under-one faced with some material of a dingy 
red. His pantaloons are very long and loose, and of the same color 
as his coat. His stockings are woollen, either white or gray ; and 
his shoes of the kind that bear his name. His whole dress is very 
mach neglected, but not slovenly. He wears a common round hat. 
His dress when on horseback is a gray straight-bodied coat, and a 
spencer of the same material, both fastened with large pearl buttons. 
When we first saw him he was riding ; and, in addition to the above 
articles of apparel, wore round his throat a knit white woollen tippet 
in the place of a cravat, and black-velvet gaiters under his panta- 
loons. His general appearance indicates an extraordinary degree of 
health, vivacity, and spirit. His sight is still good, for he needs 
glasses only in the evening. His hearing is generally good, but a 
number of voices in animated conversation confuse it. 

"Mr. Jefferson rises in the morning as soon as he can see the 
hands of his clock, which is directly opposite his bed, and examines 
his thermometer immediately, as he keeps a regular meteorological 
diary. He employs himself chiefly in writing, till breakfast, which 
is at nine. From that time till dinner he is in his library, excepting 
that in fair weather he rides on horseback from seven to fourteen 
miles. Dines at four, returns to the drawing-room at six, when coffee 
is brought in, and passes the evening till nine in conversation. His 
habit of retiring at that hour is so strong, that it has become essen- 
tial to his health and comfort. His diet is simple, but he seems 
restrained only by his taste. His breakfast is tea and coffee, bread 
always fresh from the oven, of which he does not seem afraid, with 
sometimes a slight accompaniment of cold meat. He enjoys his din- 
ner well, taking with his meat a large proportion of vegetables. He 
has a strong preference for the wines of the Continent, of which he 
has many sorts of excellent quality, having been more than com- 
monly successful in his mode of importing and preserving them. 
Among others' we found the following, which are very rare in this 
country, and apparently not at all injured by transportation, — L'Ed- 



724 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

nau, Muscat, ,Saraian, and Blanchette de Limoux. Dinner is served 
in half Virginian, half French style, in good taste and abundance. 
No wine is put on the table till the cloth is removed. 

" In conversation Mr. Jefferson is easy and natural, and appar- 
ently not ambitious : it is not loud, as challenging general attention, 
but usually addressed to the person next him. The topics, when not 
selected to suit the character and feelings of his auditor, are those 
subjects with which his mind seems particularl}^ occupied ; and these, 
at present, may be said to be science and letters, and especially the 
University of Virginia, which is coming into existence almost entirely 
from his exertions, and will rise, it is to be hoped, to usefulness and 
credit under his contiued care. When we were with him, his favorite 
subjects were Greek and Anglo-Saxon, historical recollections of the 
times and events of the Revolution, and of his residence in France 
from 1783-4 to 1789." 

VISIT OF THE DUKE OF SAXE-WEIMAR IN 1825. 

" President Jefferson invited us to a family dinner ; but as in Char- 
lottesville there is but a single hackney-coach, and this being absent, 
we were obliged to go the three miles to Monticello on foot. 

" We went by a pathway, through well-cultivated and enclosed 
fields, crossed a creek named Eivanna, passing on a trunk of a tree 
cut in a rough shape and without rails ; then ascended a steep hill 
overgrown with wood, and came, on its top, to Mr. Jefferson's house, 
which is in an open space, walled round with bricks, forming an 
oblong whose shorter sides are rounded ; on each of the longer sides 
are portals of four columns. 

''The unsuccessful waiting for a carriage, and our long walk, caused 
such a delay, that we found the company at table when we entered ; 
but Mr. Jefferson came very kindly to meet us, forced us to take our 
seats, and ordered dinner to be served up anew. He was an old man 
of eighty-six years of age, of tall stature, plain appearance, and 
long white hair. 

" In conversation, he was very lively ; and his spirits, as also his hear- 
ing and sight, seemed not to have decreased at all with his advan- 
cing age. I found in him a man who retained his faculties remark- 
ably well in his old age, and one would have taken him for a man 
of sixty. He asked me what I had seen in Virginia. I eulogized 



VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 725 

all the places that I was certain would meet with his approbation, 
and he seemed very much pleased. The company at the table con- 
sisted of the family of his daughter, Mrs. Randolph, and of that of 
the professor of mathematics at the university, an Englishman and 
his wife. I turned the conversation to the subject of the university, 
and observed that this was the favorite topic with Mr, Jefferson : he 
entertained very sanguine hopes as to the flourishing state of the 
university in future, and believed that it, and the Harvard Univer- 
sity near Boston, would in a very short time be the only institutions 
where the youth of the United States would receive a truly classical 
and solid education. After dinner we intended to take our leave, in 
order to return to Charlottesville ; but Mr. Jefferson would not con- 
sent to it. He pressed us to remain for the night at his house. The 
evening was spent by the fire : a great deal was said about travels, 
and objects of natural historj^ ; the fine arts were also introduced, 
of which Mr. Jefferson was a great admirer. He spoke also of his 
travels in France, and the country on the Rhine, where he was very 
much pleased. His description of Virginia is the best proof what an 
admirer he is of the beauties of nature. He told us that it was 
only eight months since he could not ride on horseback ; otherwise 
he rode every day to visit the surrounding country : he entertained, 
however, hopes of being able to recommence, the next spring, his 
favorite exercise. Between nine and ten o'clock in the evening the 
company broke up, and a handsome room was assigned to me. 

" The next morning I took a walk round the house, and admired 
the beautiful panorama which this spot presents. On the left I saw 
the Blue Ridge, and between them and Monticello are smaller hills. 
Charlottesville and the university lay at my feet; before me, the 
valley of the Rivanna River, which farther on makes its junction 
with the James River ; and on my right was the flat part of Virginia, 
the extent of which is lost in distance ; behind me was a towering 
hill which limited the sight. The interior of the house was plain, 
and the furniture somewhat of an old fashion. In the entrance was 
a marble stove, with Mr. Jefferson's bust, by Cerracchi. In the room 
hung several copies of the celebrated pictures of the Italian school, 
views of Monticello, Mount Vernon, the principal buildings in Wash- 
ington, and Harper's Ferry ; there were also an oil-];)ainting and an 
engraving of the Natural Bridge, views of Niagara by Vanderlin, a 
sketch of the large picture by Trumbull representing the surrender 



726 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

at Yorktown, and a pen-drawing of Hector's Departure by Benja- 
min West, presented by bim to General Kosciuszko ; finally, several 
portraits of Mr. Jefferson, among wbicb tbe best was tbat in profile, 
by Stuart. In tbe saloon tbere were two busts, one of Napoleon as 
First Consul, and anotber of the Emperor Alexander. Mr. Jefferson 
admired Napoleon's military tactics, but did not love him. After 
breakfast, which we took with the family, we bade the respectable old 
man farewell, and set out upon our return to Charlottesville. 

" Mr. Jefferson tendered us tbe use of his carriage ; but I declined, 
as I preferred walking in a fine and cool morning." 



CHAPTER LXXn. 

LAST TEARS AND DATS. 

The meeting of Jefferson and Lafayette in 1824 fills a great 
place in the inemoirs of those times. They had labored together in 
anxious and critical periods, — first when Jefferson was governor of 
Virginia, and Lafayette commanded the forces defending the State 
against the inroads of Cornwallis ; and afterwards when Jefferson, 
a tyro in diplomacy, enjoyed the powerful aid of the young and 
popular nobleman at the court of France. Thirty-six years had 
jjassed since that memoi-able day when Lafayette had brought the 
leaders of the Revolution to Jeft'erson's house in Paris, and they 
had there eaten a sacramental dinner, and afterwards, under the 
serene influence of the silent master of the feast, arranged a pro- 
gramme upon which it was possible for them to unite. Thirty-six 
years ! Both were old men now, — Jefferson past eighty, Lafayette 
nearly seventy; but both retained every faculty except those which 
begin to perish as soon as they are created. Jefferson exulted when 
he heard of the landing of his ancient friend and colleague. " I 
hope," said he, "we shall close his visit with something more solid 
for him than dinners and balls ; " and it was Jefferson who proposed 
that Congress should pay part of the unrecorded and unclaimed 
debt which the country owed Lafayette for money advanced during 
the Revolutionary War. 

During the heats of August the French republican landed in 
New York ; and as soon as the cool days of September came he 
moved southward on a pilgrimage to Monticello. They met on one 
of the fine days of October. Jefi'erson would have gone some dis- 
tance to welcome his approaching guest ; but the gentlemen in 
charge of the occasion requested him to remain at his house, wliile 
they escorted the Marquis from Charlottesville to the summit of the 

727 



728 LIFE OF THOilAS JEFFEESOX. 

mount. A brave cavalcade of the gentlemen of the county, with 
trumpets sounding, and banners waving in the breeze, accompanied 
him, and formed aboirt the lawn, while the carriage advanced to the 
front of the mansion. A great concourse of excited and expectant 
people were present, gazing intently upon the portico. The car- 
riage drew up ; and while an alert little figure with gray hair 
descended, the front door of the house opened, and the tall, bent, 
and wasted form of JeflFerson was seen. The music ceased, and 
every head was uncovered. The two old men threw themselves into 
each other's arms, and relieved their feelings by a hearty embrace. 
The coldest heart was moved, and tears filled the eyes of almost 
every spectator. They entered the house together, and the assem- 
bly dispersed. 

During the stay of Lafayette at Monticello, there was a grand 
banquet given in his honor in the great room of the university, 
whicli was attended by President Monroe and the two ex-Presidents, 
Madison and Jefferson. It was a time of hilarity and enthusiasm 
such as we can all easily imagine. When Jefferson was toasted, he 
handed a written speech to a' friend to read to the company. I 
think he meant this address as a kind of farewell to his countrymen, 
and to the great cause to which his own life and the life of his 
guest had been devoted, — the supremacy of Eight in the affairs 
of men. 

'' I will avail myself of this occasion, my beloved neighbors and 
friends, to thank you for the kindness which now, and at all times, 
I have received at your hands. Born and bred among your fathers, 
led by their partiality into the line of public life, I labored in fel- 
lowship with them through that arduous struggle, which, freeing us 
from foreign bondage, established us in the rights of self-govern- 
i3;ient, — rights which have blessed ourselves, and will bless, in their 
sequence, all the nations of the earth. In this contest we all did 
our utmost ; and, as none could do more, none had pretensions to 
superior merit. 

" I joj, my friends, in your joy, inspired by the visit of this our 
ancient and distinguished leader and benefactor. His deeds in the 
War of Independence you have heard and read. They are known 
to you, and embalmed in your memories and in the pages of faithful 
history. His deeds in the peace which followed that war are per- 



LAST YEARS AND DAYS. 729 

haps not known to you ; but I can attest them. When I was sta- 
tioned in liis country, for the purpose of cementing its friendsliip 
with ours, and of advancing our mutual interests, this friend of 
both was my most powerful auxiliary and advocate. He made our 
caiTse his own, as in truth it was that of his native country also. 
His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all 
departments were open to him at all times : to me only formally 
and at appointed times. In truth, I only held the nail : he drove it. 
Honor him, then, as your benefactor in peace, as well as in war. 

"My friends, I am old, long in the disuse of making speeches, 
and without voice to utter them. In this feeble state the exhausted 
jjowers of life leave little within my competence for your service. 
If, with the aid of my younger and abler coadjutors, I can still con- 
tribute any thing to advance the institution within whose walls we 
are now mingling manifestations to this our guest, it will be, as it 
ever has been, cheerfully and zealously bestowed. And could I live 
to see it once enjoy the patronage and cherishment of our public 
authorities v.'ith undivided voice, I should die without a doubt of 
the future fortunes of my native State, and in the consoling contem- 
plation of the happy influence of this institution on its character, its 
virtue, its prosperity', and safety. 

" To these effusions for the cradle and land of my birth, I add, for 
our nation at large, the aspirations of a heart warm with the love 
of country ; whose invocations to Heaven for its indissoluble union 
will be fervent and unremitting while the pulse of life continues to 
beat ; and^ when that ceases, it will expire in prayers for the eternal 
duration of its freedom and prosperity." 

When Lafayette again visited Monticello, in 1825, to take leave 
of his venerable friend, the university was open, with a fair pros- 
pect of realizing at length the fond hopes of its chief founder. 
Professors and students gathered about the visitor, and enlivened 
the table of his illustrious liost. 

These last years of Mr. Jefferson's life were not wholly passed in 
such lofty occupations as the founding of a university and the 
entertainment of a nation's guest. His own estate, always more 
large than productive, had been diminishing in value for many 
years. Few men lost more by the Embargo, in proportion to their 
means, than the author of that measure ; and this was one of the 



730 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

reasons why he left Washington in 1809 owing twenty thousand 
dolhirs. The war of 1812 continued the suspension of commerce, 
and made tobacco and cotton ahnost worthless. After the war, Mr. 
Jefferson relieved himself of his most pressing embarrassments by 
selling the part of his estate which was most precious to him, and 
most peculiarly his own, — his library, — the result of sixty 
years', affectionate search and selection. He offered it to Congress 
to supply the place of their library burnt by the English soldiers in 
1814 ; and he sedulously schemed to cut down the price so as to 
silence the murmurs of his old enemies, and prevent the purchase 
from being an injurj'^ to his friends. The committee valued it at 
twenty-three thousand dollars, about half its cost, and a quarter of 
its worth. Mr. Bacon had the charge of removing the boohs to 
Washington. " There was an immense quantity of them," he tells 
us, " sixteen wagon-loads. Each wagon was to carry three thou- 
sand pounds for a load, and to have four dollars a day for delivering 
them in Washington. If they carried more than three thousand 
pounds, they were to have extra pay. There were all kinds of 
books, — books in a great many languages that I knew nothing 
about." 

And so Mr. Jefferson lost his library just when he needed it 
most ; and Congress did not dare improve the golden opportunity 
(by merely paying the just value of a unique collection) of giving 
him substantial relief. His own collection of books had been largely 
increased in 1807 by his old friend. Chancellor Wythe, bequeathing 
to him his library. All these accumulations, except a few favorites, 
he was obliged to part with in his old age. 

The hard times of 1819 and 1820, which reduced so many estab- 
lished families to poverty, brought upon Mr. Jefferson also an 
insupportable burden. He. had indorsed for one of his oldest 
friends and connections to the amount of twenty thousand dollars, 
in the confident expectation of saving him from ruin. His friend 
became bankrupt jiotwithstanding ; and the indorser had to take 
upon his aged shoulders this crushing addition to his already ex- 
cessive load, — twelve hundred dollars a year in money. One con- 
sequence of this misfortune was, that he lost the services of his 
faithful and competent manager, Edmund Bacon, who had been for 
some years looking westward, intending to buy land and settle 
there. " I was sorry," he says, " to leave Mr. Jefferson ; but I was 



LAST YEAES AND DAYS. 731 

more willing to do it, because I did not wish to see the poor old 
gentleman suffer, what I knew he must suffer, from the debts that 
were pressing upon him." They had a sorrowful parting after their 
twenty years of friendly and familiar intercourse. " It was a trying 
time to me," Mr. Bacon records. " I don't know whether he shed 
any tears or not, but I know that I shed a good many. He was 
sitting in his room, on his sofa, where I had seen him so often ; and 
keeping hold of my hand some time, he said, ' Now let us hear from 
each other occasionally ; ' and as long as he lived I heard from him 
once or twice a year. The last letter I ever had from him was 
when I wrote him of the death of my wife, soon after T got to Ken- 
tucky. He expressed a great deal of sympatliy for me ; said he 
did not wonder that I felt completely broken up, and was disposed 
to move back ; that he had passed through the same himself; and 
only time and silence would relieve me." 

Mr. Jefferson's affairs did not mend, though he enjoyed the able 
and resolute assistance of his grandson and namesake, Thomas 
Jefferson Randolph ; and he resolved, at length, to discharge the 
worst of his debts, in the fashion of old Virginia, by selling a por- 
tion of his lands. But there was nobody to buy. Land sold in the 
usual way would not bring a third of its value ; and consequently 
he petitioned the legislature to relax the operation of law so far as 
to all6w him to dispose of some of his farms by lottery, as was fre- 
quently done when money was to be raised for a public object. The 
legislature granted his request, though with reluctance. But, in 
the mean time, it had been noised abroad, all over the Union, that 
the author of the Declaration of Independence was about to lose 
that far-famed Monticello with which his name had been associated 
in the public mind for two generations, the abode of liis prime and 
the refuge of his old age, a Mecca to the republicans of many 
lands. A feeling arose in all liberal minds that tliis must not be; 
and during the spring of 1826, the last of his years, subscriptions 
were made for his relief in several places. Philip Hone, mayor of 
New York, raised without an effort, as Mr. Randall records, eight 
thousand five hundred dollars. Philadelphia sent five thousand, and 
Baltimore three thousand. The lottery was suspended ; and Mr. 
Jefferson's last days were solaced by the belief that the subscrip- 
tions w'ould suffice to free his estate from debt, and secure home and 
independence to his daughter and her children. He was proud of 



732 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

the liberality of his countrymen, and proud to be its object. He 
who had refused to accept so much as a loan from the legislature 
of his State gloried in being the recipient of gifts from individuals. 
"No cent of this," said he, "is wrung from the tax-payer. It is 
the pure and unsolicited offering of love." 

There has seldom been a sounder constitution than his, nor one 
less abused. At eighty-two his teeth were all but perfect, he 
enjoyed his daily ride on horseback of ten miles, and he was only 
afraid that life might continue after it had ceased to be a blessing. 
" I have ever," he wrote to Mr. Adams in 1822, " dreaded a doting 
old age ; and my health has been generally so good, and is now so 
good, that I dread it still. The rapid decline of my strength 
during the last winter has made me hope sometimes that I see land. 
During summer I enjoy its temperature; but I shudder at the 
approach of winter, and wish I could sleep through it with the dor- 
mouse, and only wake with him in spring, if ever." Reduced 
by an occasional diarrhoea, he alternately rallied and declined 
during the next three years, but, of course, never quite regained 
after an attack what he had lost. By his family the decay of his 
bodily |)owers was scarcely observed, it was so gradual, until the 
spring of 1826, when it became more obvious and rapid. It was 
his habit all his life to be silent with regard to his own sufferings ; 
and now, especially, he concealed from every one the ravages of a 
disease which, he knew, was about to deliver him from the "doting 
old age" that he dreaded. His grandson just mentioned, who 
stood nearer to him at this period than any one except his daughter, 
was taken by surprise when he heard him say, in March, 1826, that 
he might live till midsummer; and again, when, about the middle 
of June, he said, as he handed him a paper to read, " Don't delay : 
there is no time to be lost." 

From that day he was under regular medical treatment. He told 
his ph3^sician. Dr. Dunglison of the university, that he attributed 
his disease to his free use, some years before, of the water of the 
White Sulphur Springs of Virginia. On the 24th of June he was 
still well enough to write a long letter in reply to an invitation to 
attend the fiftieth celebration of the Fourth of July, at Washington. 

How sanguine his mind within nine days of his death! "All 
eyes," he wrote, with trembling hand indeed, but with a heart buoy- 
ant and alert, "are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The 



LAST YEAES AND DAYS. 733 

general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every 
view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind have not been born 
with, saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, 
ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." ISTothing of 
him was impaired but his body, even then. But that grew steadily 
weaker until he la}' upon his bed, serene, painless, cheerful, in full 
possession of his reason, but helpless and dying. He conversed 
calmly with his family concerning his affairs, in the k)ne of a person 
about to set out upon a journey whicli could not be avoided. He 
mentioned to his friends a fact of his mental condition that seemed 
to strike him as peculiar, — that the scenes and events of the Revo- 
lutionary period kept recurring to him. The curtains of his bed, he 
said, were brought over in the first ship that arrived after the peace 
of 1782 ; and he related many incidents of those eventful times. 
Once, while he was dozing, he placed his hands as if he were writing 
with his right on a tablet held in his left, and murmured, "Warn 
the committee to be on the alert." When his grandson said that he 
thought he was a little better, he replied, " Do not imagine for a 
moment that I feel the smallest solicitude about the result. I am 
like an old watch, with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, 
until it can go no longer." Upon imagining that he heard a clergy- 
man of the neighborhood in the next room, he said, " I have no 
objection to see him as a kind and good neighbor ; " meaning, as his 
grandson thought, that he did not desire to see him in his profes- 
sional character. He repeated on his death-bed a remark which he 
had made a hundred times before : His calumniators he had never 
thought were assailing him, but a being non-existent, of their own 
imagining, to whom they had given the name of Thomas Jefferson. 
Observing a little grandson eight years old in the room, he said with 
a smile, ''George does not understand what all this means." He 
spoke much of IMr. Madison, who, he hoped, would succeed him as 
rector of the university. He eulogized him justly as one of the best 
of men and one of the greatest of citizens. 

During the 3d of July he dozed hour after hour, under the influ- 
ence of opiates, rousing occasionally, and uttering a few words. It 
was evident that his end was very near; and a fervent desire arose in 
all minds that he should live until the day which he had assisted to 
consecrate half a century before. He, too, desired it. At eleven in 
the evening Mr. N. P. Trist, the young husband of one of his grand- 



734 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

daughters, sat by his pillow watching his face, and turning every 
minute toward the slow-moving hands of the clock, dreading lest the 
flickering flame should go out before midnight. " This is the 
Fourth ? " whispered the dying patriot. Mr. Trist could not bear to 
say, " Not yet ; '• so he remained silent. "This is the Fourth?" 
again asked ]\Ir. Jeiferson in a whisper. Mr. Trist nodded assent. 
"Ah !" he breathed; and an expression of satisfaction passed over 
his countenance.' Again he sunk into sleep, which all about him 
feared was the slumber of death. But midnight came; the night 
passed ; the morning dawned ; the sun rose ; the new day progressed ; 
and still he breathed, and occasionally indicated a desire by words 
or looks. At twenty minutes to one in the afternoon he ceased 
to live. 

At Quinc3^, on the granite shore of distant Massachusetts, another 
memorable death-scene was passing on this Fourth of July, 1826. 

John Adams, at the age of ninety-one, had been an enjoyer of 
existence down almost to the dawn of the fiftieth Fourth of July. 
He voted for Monroe in 1820. His own son was president of the 
United States in 1826' He used to sit many hours of every day, 
tranquilly listening to members of his family, while they read to him 
the new books with which friends in Boston, knowing his taste, kept 
him abundantly supplied. He, who was a formed man when Dr. 
Johnson was writing his Dictionary, lived to enjoy Scott's novels and 
Byron's poetry. His grandson, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the 
worthy heir of an honorable name, then a youth of eighteen, used to 
sit by him, he tolls us, for days together, reading to him, "watching 
the noble image of a serene old age, or listening with unabated inter- 
est to the numerous anecdotes, the reminiscences of the past, and 
the speculations upon the questions of all times, in which he loved 
to indulge." On the last day of June, 1826, though his sti-ength 
had much declined of late, he was still well enough to receive and 
chat with a neighbor, the orator of the coming anniversary, who 
called to ask him for a toast to be offered at the usual banquet. " I 
will give you," said the old man, " Ixdepkndexce forever ! " 
Being asked if he wished to add any thing to it, he replied, " Not a 
word." The day came. It was evident that he could not long sur- 
vive. He lingered, tranquil and without pain, to the setting of the 
sun. The last words that he articulated were thought to be, " Thomas 
Jefferson still lives." As the sun sank below the horizon, a noise of 



LAST YEAES AND DAYS. 735 

great shouting was heard iu the village, and reached even the apart- 
ment in which the old man lay. It was the enthusiastic cheers 
called forth by his toast, — Independence forever. Before the sounds 
died away he had breathed his last. 

The coincidence of the death of these two venerable men on the 
day associated with their names in all minds did not startle the 
whole country at once, on the morning of the next day, as such an 
event now. would. Slowly the news of Mr. Adams's death spread 
over the Northern States, while that of Mr. Jefferson's was borne 
more slowly over the Southern; so that almost everj^' person hea"rd of 
the death of one several days before he learned the death of the 
other. ' The public mind had been wrought to an unusual degree of 
patriotic fervor by the celebration of the nation's birth, when few 
orators had failed to allude to the sole survivors of the body which 
had declared independence. That one of them should have departed 
on that day struck every mind as something remarkable. But when 
it became known that the author of the Declai*ation and its most 
powerful defender had both breathed their last on the Fourth of July, 
the fiftieth since they had set it apart from the roll of common days, 
it seemed as if Heaven had given its visible and unerring sanction to 
the work they had done. 

Among Mr. Jefferson's papers was found a rough sketch in ink 
of a stone to mark his grave. He designed it to be an obelisk of 
granite eight feet high ; and he wished it to bear the following 
inscription, which it does : 

HERE WAS BURIED 

THOMAS JEFFERSON, 

AUTHOR 

OF THE DECLARATION OF 

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, 

OF 

THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA 

FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND 

FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY 

OF VIRGINIA. 

His remains were placed in the family burial-ground, near the 
summit of Monticello, on the spot selected nearly seventy years 
before by Dabney Carr and himself, and where the dust of Carr 



736 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

had reposed for half a century, awaiting the coining of his friend. 
His wife lies on one side of him, and his youngest daughter, his 
fragile and clinging Maria, on the other. 

But the utmost efforts of his executor did not suffice to retain 
even this hurial-ground, still less the mansion and estate, in the 
possession of the family. Thomas Jefferson died more than sol- 
vent; hut the extreme depression of values in Virginia in 1826 and 
the few following years, compelled the total sacrifice of the property. 
The debts were paid to the uttermost farthing; but Martha Jeffer- 
son and her children lost their home, and had no means of provid- 
ing another. These circumstances becoming known, the legislatures 
\^ of South Carolina and Louisiana each voted to Mrs. Randolph an 
honorable gift of ten thousand dollars. She lived to the year 1836, 
when she died suddenly at the age of sixty-three, and her remains 
were buried close to those of her parents. A large number of her 
descendants survive to this day. 



CHAPTEE LXXIII. 

SUMMART. 

Jeffekson was among the most fortunate of men. In modern 
times a person, in order to fulfil the requirements of an eminent 
career, needs to be so variously equipped and so richly furnished, 
that few individuals can hold on to the end unless fortune begins 
by placing them on vantage-ground. A strong father must usually 
precede the gifted son, and break the road for him. It is not enough, 
in the realm of the intellect, for the father to conquer leisure for 
the son, though that is desirable. He must be the beginning of the 
boy's culture, and save him from the melancholy waste of unlearn- 
ing in maturity what he had learned in childhood. We find, accord- 
ingly, that many of our recent famous names belong to two persons, 
— father and child ; and perhaps this will be more frequently the 
case as knowledge increases and the standard of attainment rises. 
We have two Pitts, two Mills, two Macaulays, two ISTiebuhrs, two 
Darwins, two Landseers, two Collinses, two D'Israelis, two Beechers, 
two Bryants, two Arnolds. We have had men, too, whose career 
was fatally harmed and limited only because they had but one 
parent, and that one not a father. 

On the other hand, no one is more likely to have been ill-born 
than a person sprung from an ancient family. The marriages which 
perpetuate an historic house, being usually prompted by considera- 
tions of rank and estate, cannot but result, at last, in reducing both 
the volume and the vivacity of the average brain of the family. This 
we should infer from the little that is known of the art of breeding 
superior creatures, if the fact were not plainly exhibited in the qual- 
ity of existing aristocracies and royal lines. In all literature there 
can be found no delineations of vulgarit}' so unmitigated as those 
^ith which the masters of modern fiction (from Scott to George 
\ 47 737 



738 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

Eliot) favor us when they portray the aristocratic life of Europe. 
The curious insensibility to every thing elevated and interesting 
which their ancient families exhibit is merely a natural consequence 
of a system of pairing with which neither instinct nor science has 
had any thing to do. 

It was Jefferson's happiness to derive from his progenitors the 

maximum of help with the minimum of hinderance. His stalwart 

father created for him a peaceful and healthy home in a beautiful 

land, and provided sufficiently, but not excessively, for his education 

and training. His father, too, though not a scholar, was a man of 

sound intelligence and practical ability, who honored learning by 

word and deed, and marked out for his boy a liberal career. He 

was also an embodiment of that ancient something in the British 

people which created parliament, established parishes, invented the 

jury, extorted Magna Charta, resisted Charles I., brought over 

William and Mary, passed the Habeas Corpus act, carried the 

Keform Bill, and disestablished the Irish Church. 

I The political part of Thomas Jefferson's career in America was 

j the application and development of the ancient Whig principles which 

; his father loved and lived. 

His religious tone was also that of most healthy English souls 
before religion became intense and opinionative. The Jeifersons 
appear to have been of that good-tempered and sensible class who 
escaped the anguish and narrowness of the Puritan period, equally 
incapable of fighting a bishop or stoning a Quaker, To such, reli- 
gion was never a system or a salvation. It was the supreme decency, 
the highest etiquette, with the addition of bell-ringing and merry 
Christmas. That Jefferson was able to attain to a rational and 
comfortable tone of mind on this distracting subject, without any 
severe internal conflict, wrs a happiness he owed to the well-attem- 
pered mind of his father, and to the healthy race from which he 
sprang. 

There was a most rare union of good qualities in his bodily con- 
stitution. Here was a man capable of lifting a thousand pounds, — 
the strongest in a county full of the exceptionally strong; but to 
this jjrodigious jjhj^sical power there was joined a dexterity of hand 
and a firm delicacy of touch beyond those of a woman. His hand- 
writing was as minute as it was strong and clear, and he greatly 
excelled iu the arts and devices that demand the union of strength 



SUMMAEY. 739 

and delicacy. The least effeminate of men, he was very feminine ia 
many of his ways, feelings, and tastes. The wild beast was more 
nearly extirpated in him than in. any other human being of whom I 
have any familiar knowledge. People could live with him many 
years and not once see him angry, ill-humored, irritable, or melan- 
choly. He rose jocund to greet the dawn, and lived a festal life to 
the going down of the sun, his hours all filled with occupation 
innocent, elevated, and becoming. The barbaric traits, too, were 
strangely subdued in him. Who so little vain as he? who less 
selfish ? which of the sons of men has held the troublesome er/o in 
juster subjection, while guarding with solicitous and vigilant respect 
the sensitive self-love of other men ? In his private and public life 
there was the happiest possible mixture of the firm and ^e tractable. 
And the special wonder of the case was, that the beast and the 
savage had been bred out of him and educated out of him without 
in the least impairing his original vigor and vivacity. 

Very different was his serene and sunny good temper from mere 
animal spirits. There was thought and principle in his good tem- 
per. In this great matter of temper, upon which the hourly happi- 
ness of our race depends, vfe find him still tlie educated being. He 
had reflected much upon the causes of friends' estrangements and 
the agonizing discords of home. If his observations on this subject 
were published in a four-page tract, and dropped in every human 
abode, the happiness of man would be sensibly increased by it. 
Here, for example, is a passage that might well be engraved on 
every wedding-present : — 

" Harmony in the married state is the very first object to be aimed 
at. Nothing can preserve affections uninterrupted but a firm reso- 
lution never to differ in will, and a determination in each to consider 
the love of the other as of more value than any object whatever on 
which a wish had been fixed. How light, in fact, is the sacrifice of 
any other wish, when weighed against the affections of one with 
whom we are to pass our whole life. And though opposition, in a 
single instance, will hardly of itself produce alienation, yet every 
one has his pouch into which all these little oppositions are put: 
while that is filling, the alienation is insensibly going on, and when 
filled it is complete. It would puzzle either to say wlaj, because no 
one difference of opinion has been marked enough to produce a 



740 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 

serious effect by itself. But he finds his affections wearied out by a 
constant stream of little checks and obstacles. Other sources of dis- 
content, very common indeed, are the little cross-purposes of husband 
and wife, in common conversation, — a disposition in either to criticise 
and question whatever the other saj'S, a desire always to demonstrate 
and make him feel himself in the wrong, and especially in company. 
Nothing is so goading. Much better, therefore, if our companion 
views a thing in a light different from what we do, to leave him in 
quiet possession of his view. What is the use of rectifying him, if 
the thing be unimportant; and, if important, let it pass for the 
present, and wait a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of 
revising the subject together. It is wonderful how many persons 
are rendered unhappy by inattention to these little rules of pru- 
dence." 

Such passages as these show us that the excellence to which he 
had brought the "art of living" was due to something more than a 
happy commingling of natural ingredients in the composition of 
mind and body. He was, indeed, most fortunately constituted ; but 
he was also a man who considered his ways, and controlled them. 
And this it is which alone makes his life of value to us. Jefferson's^ 
temperament few can have ; and, if our happiness depended upon 
inherited qualities, a large number of the human race might justly 
reproach the constitution of things that brought them into being. 
But there is no one, let him be as cross-grained as he may by nature, 
who maj'^not achieve a happiness and make his life a benefaction by 
acting upon Jefferson's principles. From the first hour that we get 
any knowledge of him, we see him a person who never remained 
content with the gifts of fortune, but turned them to the best 
account, and pressed forward to worthy achievement. He was an 
indomitable student always, and a man of better sustained activity 
than almost any other of his time. There was not an idle bone in 
his body. 

In his public life the same good fortune attended him. He was 
usually in the thick of events when his presence was of the utmost 
advantage to himself; but on several occasions he enjoyed those 
happy absences from the scene of difficulty which have often sufficed 
to give a public man ascendency over rivals. These absences were 
never contrived, and their advantage never could have been fore- 



71 ' 



-iMvt4 * SUMMARY. y ^. ;-....74J 

seen. During that buoyant and inspiring period when all hearts 
were in unison, from the Stamp Act to the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, circumstances and inclination united to keep him in the van . 
of affairs, and to assign him the kind of work in doing which Nature 
had formed him to excel. Thus, by an exercise of his tjilents which J 
we may call slight and acci<lenta,l, his name was forever associated 
with the act that began the national life of America. Virginia then 
summoned him imperatively away to adjust her laws and institutions 
to the Declaration which he had penned. When, at last, his good 
fortune seemed to forsake him, and the storm of war broke over 
Virginia, so long exempt, and swept away civil government and 
civil governor, then the triumph at Yorktown consigned his mishaps 
to prompt oblivion, and all men saw in the light of that triumph 
that he had done whatever was possible by civil methods. 

It has been said that a complete man buttons up a good soldier 
whenever he puts on his waistcoat. This would be true if there were 
any complete men. But there are not. If Jefferson, when the war~ 
broke out, had gone to the field, and kept Arnold from ravaging his 
native province, and been in at, the death of the hunted foe at York- ^ 
town, he would have done a noble and heroic thing; but he would 
not have been Thomas Jefferson. And, from first to last, there was 
always in Virginia a redundancy of ofiScers. John Marshall, after- 
wards chief justice, went all the way from Virginia to head-quarters 
near New York, alone, on foot, ragged,,and destitute ; because, after 
waiting many months, he could not find in Virginia a chance to serve 
as an ofiScer. In the field Jefferson could only have rendered service 
that many stood ready to perform ; in civil office he did some splen- 
did things which no man in Virginia could have done so well as he. 

After the war, during all that anxious and dividing period when 
the thirteen States lacked the hoop to the barrel, he was honorably 
absent in France ; and again, during the frenzied time of American 
politics, from 1797 to 1800, h_e_was safe^ and snug at home, while 
friend and foe conspired to give prominence and fascination to his 
name. In the closing years of his life his peace was disturbed by 
the decline in the value of his estate, and by apprehension for the 
future of his descendants. But he died without knowing the worst, 
and the timely generosity of two grateful States saved his daughter 
from painful embarrassment. He was happier in this than either of 
the other two of the Republican triumvirate. Monroe died bank- 



742 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

rupt and dependent. Mrs. Madison knew what it was to want 
bread.* 

Jefferson needed the happy accidents of his life to atone for his 
deficiencies as a puBlic man. He was shy; he shrank from publi- 
city ; he was not combative; he was no orator; he could not have 
controlled a public assembly, nor handled a mass-meeting. Nature 
had not fitted him for an executive office ; and if he had lived in 
peaceful times, and been born subject to the ordinary conditions, he 
never would have made his way into politics at all. Whether he 
would have been an artist or a man of science would have depended 
upon the place and time of his birth ; but .he would have pursued 
either of those careers with that blending of passion and plod which 
distinguishes the man who is doing the precise thing Nature meant 
him to do. 

But having been called into politics, and kept in politics, by the 
exigencies of his country, and by the proprieties of the place he 
held in it, he bore himself wonderfully well. He represented the 
best side of his country in a foreign land, remaining proof against 
all the seductions of his place to take part with the graceful and 
picturesque oppressor, instead of the homely, helpless, ill-favored 
oppressed. E-eturning home he finds a tone in society, a style in 
the government, an influence in the air, that first astonished, soon 
disgusted him, and before long determined him to retire from public 
life. Circumstances had given to the narrow Scotch intellect 
of young Hamilton an ascendency in the unformed, groping politics 
of the thirteen States to which it was not naturally entitled. 

After dwelling long in the political dissensions of that period, and 
tracing their consequences to the present moment, I feel deeply the 
truth of Jefferson's remark, that Hamilton was the evil genius of 
America. He meddled balefully with the metal of American insti- 
tutions while it was cooling, and so muddled the political system of 



* " In the last days of her life, before Conjifress had purchased her husband's 
papers, Mrs. Madison was in a state of absolute poverty ; and I think sometimes 
suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant to Mr. (Daniel) Web- 
ster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me, 
whenever I saw any thing in the house that I thought she was in need of, to take 
it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own 
pocket, though I had yeai-s before bought my freedom of her." — A Colored Alan's 
Reminiscences of James Madison, p. 16. 



SUMMARY. 743 

tlie country, that probably it will never get the shape originally 
intended till it is recast. At the moment when I am writing these 
words, the country is striving to rid itself of that miserable fag-end 
of one of Hamilton's ridiculous ingenuities, — the electoral colleges. 
Perhaps in 1887, the hundredth anniversary of the constitutional 
convention, the country may be ri^je for a second constitutional con- 
vention, which will thoroughly JefFersonize the general government; 
making it the simple, strong, and strictly limited agency which the 
people meant it should be, and desire that it shall be. Why have a 
written constitution if it is not to be religiously complied with? 
How safe, how wise, how adapted to our'limited human capacity, the 
simple theory of the general government which Jefferson and Mad- 
ison-defended? 

Called to administer the government, we find Jefferson still at- 
tended by that strange, and, I may, say startling good luck, that pur- 
sued him from the cradle to the grave. A general peace promptly 
followed his inauguration ; and when that peace was broken (an 
event that brought woe ui^on the rest of Christendom), it enabled 
him to add to his country the most valuable aequisition which it was 
possible for it to receive. While Europe shuddered to hear the mutter- 
ing of the coming storm, three gentlemen in Paris quietly arranged 
the terms on which the United States were to possess the mouths of 
the Mississippi, and an empire which the Mississippi drained. But 
I venture again to affirm, that, much as he was favored by fortune, 
his merit was equal to his fortun^ He rose to every opportunity, 
and improved to the very uttermosTT'^fll: 'his chances. , Since civil 
government was founded, never was a government administered with 
such strict, such single-hearted, such noble-minded, such wise fidel- 
ity. Ages hence, when all the nations will be republican and feder- 
ated, the administration of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and 
Dearborn will be loved and venerated as the incomparable model, to 
be aimed at always if never reached. 

There was of course some shade to this bright picture of human 
excellence. Jefferson, too, was a limited and defective person, like 
all the rest of our race. The first rank among mortals is justly as- 
signed to the discoverers of truth, and the second to those who 
heroically render new truth available for human use. Toscanelli, 
who taught Columbus that he could reach the East by sailing to the 
West, represents the first order of men ; and the heroic mariner who 

49 



744 LIFE OF THOMAS JEPFEESON. 

directed his prow westward, and sailed dauntless till a new world 
had been reached, is the type of the second. Of our own generation, 
Charles Darwin will probably be regarded by posterity as our first 
man of the first order, and John Brown as a specimen of the second. 
It cannot be said that Jefferson belonged to either of these illustri- 
ous classes. Nor can we claim for him a place among men of genius, 
the pets and darlings of manliind, who cheer, amuse, soften, and 
exalt the care-laden sons of men. 

Our faults appear to spring from the same root as our excellencies. 
A man of very quick, warm sympathies, cool intellect, and good tem- 
per is not the person to pioneer a conviction. He is apt to have so clear 
a sense of the necessity which antagonists are under to think just as 
they do think, that he forbears to assail their opinions. Some read- 
ers of Jefferson's letters will feel, that, occasionally, he carried his 
tolerance of other people's sentiments to a point bpyond what courte- 
sy demanded. In writing, for example, to Isaac Story, one of the 
few New England clergymen who sided with him in politics, he good- 
naturedly used expressions that seemed to imply a belief which we 
know he repudiated. This respectable clergyman had sent him some 
speculations with regard to the transmigration of souls, and improved 
the occasion to compliment him upon his inaugural address. Jefferson 
replied, "The laws of nature have withheld from us the means of 
physical knowledge of the country of spirits ; and revelation has, for 
reasons unknown to us, chosen to leave us in the dark as we were. 
When I was young, I was fond of the speculations which seemed to 
promise some insight into that hidden country ; but observing at 
length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had 
found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or think con- 
cerning them, and have reposed my head on that pillow of ignorance 
#hich a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how 
much we should be forced to use it. I have thought it better, by 
nourishing the good passions and controlling the bad, to merit an 
inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and 
to trust for the future to Him who has been so good for the past." 

And again, at the close of this kind and wise letter, he uses simi- 
lar language. 

" I am happy in your approbation of the principles I avowed on 
entering on the government. Ingenious minds, availing themselves 
of the imperfection of language, have tortured the expressions out 



SUMMAEY. 745 

of their plain meaning, in order to infer departures from them in 
practice. If revealed language has not been able to guard itself 
against misinterpretations, I could not expect it." 

The complaisance to a clerical friend that prompted the use of the 
words revelation and revealed seems to me to have been excessive 
and needless. Nothing could have been more absurd than for him 
to obtrude opposition to a belief which so many of the virtuous peo- 
ple of Christendom then cherished ; but it was not necessary to lend 
it support. Very few such instances, however, occur in the nine 
volumes of his writings which we possess, and noAe occur in his 
letters to persons whom he might be supposed interested to concili- 
ate. The belief implied in the use of the word revelation is one 
to which no intelligent person can be indift'erent; because, if it is 
true, it is the most important of all beliefs, and, if false, it is the 
most obstructive and misleading. 

I cannot agree with those who think he ought, being an abolition- 
ist, to have emancipated his slaves. There are virtuous and heroic 
acts, which, when they are done, we passionately admire, but which, 
at the same time, we have no right to demand or expect. Few per- 
sons acquainted with the history and character of John Brown could 
avoid having some sense of the real sublimity of his conduct ; but 
who can pretend that human affairs admit of being generally con- 
ducted on the John Brown principle ? If Jefferson, on coming to a 
clear sense of the iniquity of slavery and the impossibility of indu- 
cing Virginia to abolish it, had set his slaves free, and led them forth 
with his daughter Martha holding his right hand, Maria the left,, 
and the slaves marching behind with their bundles and their chil- 
dren, and he had conducted them to a free territory, and established 
them as freemen and freeholders, standing by them till they were 
able to take care of themselves, he would have done one of those 
high, heroic deeds which contemporaries call Quixotic, and posterity 
sublime. And if, while the young patriarch was on the march, a 
mob of white trash had set upon him and killed him, contemporaries 
might have said it served him right, and centuries hence his name 
might serve as the pretext for a new religion, and nations contend 
for the possession of his tomb. But no one has a right to cen- 
sure him for not having done this, except a person who has given proof, 
that, in similar circumstances, he would have done it. Such individ- 
uals — and there are a few such in each generation — seldom cen- 
sure any one. 



746 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

We must admit, then, that he belonged neither to the first nor to 
the second order of human beings. He was not the discoverer of 
the truths he loved, nor did he promote their acceptance by any of 
the heroic metliods. He did not always avoid the errors to which 
his cast of character rendered him peculiarly liable. 

But the sum of his merit was exceedingly great. He was an 
almost perfect citizen. He loved and believed in his species. Few 
men have ever been better educated than he, or practised more habit- 
ually the methods of an educated person. He defended the honor of 
the human intellect when its natural foes throughout Christendom 
conspired to revile, degrade, and crush it. After Washington, he was 
the best chief magistrate of a republic the world has ever known ; 
and, in some material particulars, he surpassed Washington. He 
keenly enjoyed his existence, and made it a benefaction to his kind. 



INDEX. 



Il^DEX. 



Adams, Charles Francis. Upon old age of 
John Adams, 734. 

Adams, John. Proscribed in England, 142. 
In Congress, 164. Quoted upon Jefferson, 
164, 165. Upon Dickinson's timidity, 165. 
Upon Franklin's galleys, 181. Upon Har- 
rison, 192. His opinions upon government 
in 1776, 195, 196. Jefferson to, on Mazzei, 
227. Curses the protective system, 275. 
Envoy in Europe, 276. Franklin to, in 1784, 
280. Treats for American captives in Bar- 
bary, 298. In England with Jefferson, 312, 
313. Upon presidential etiquette, 366. 
Publishes discourses upon Davila, 370. 
Minister to London, 403. Upon Paine's re- 
ply to Burke, 425. Pubhcola attributed to, 
427. Upon the British Constitution, 438. 
To Jefferson on the Genet excitement, 489. 
Jefferson to, on farming, 509. Relates Jef- 
ferson's first nomination to the presidency, 
513. Extols Ames, 519. Elected president, 
524. Distrustful, 543. His alarm in 1798, 
556. Convinced by Gerry, re-opens rela- 
tions with France, 560. His heterodoxy, 
570. During the tie intrigues of 1801, 579. 
Retires from the presidency, 585. His 
journey to Washington, 600. His last ap- 
pointments, 609. Upon Jefferson's admin- 
istration, 634. His difference with Jeffer- 
son, 679. Detests Cahinism, 711. His 
death, 734. 

Adams, Mrs. John. To Europe in 1784, 279. 
Describes a strange flower, 309. Entertains 
Maria Jefferson, 332. Her journey to 
Washington in 1800, 601. Her correspond- 
ence with Jefferson, 679. 

Adams, John Quincy. Upon Paine's reply to 
Burke, 426. Upon Jefferson's administra- 



tion, 633. Why not appointed by Jeffer- 
son, 681. 

Adams, Samuel. Proscribed in England, 142. 
•In Congress, 164. On Liberty, 373. Thought 
of for governor, 428. Gerry to, on Boston 
Port-Bill, 542. Jefferson to, after his in- 
auguration, 588. 

Alberti. Teacher music at Monticello, 133. 
Jefferson to, on a home band of music, 221. 

Alexander I. of Russia. Jefferson accepts 
his bust, 625. 

Alexandria, Va. Aids Boston, 131. Welcomes 
Jefferson home, 347. 

Alfred, King. His laws, 50. 

Algiers. Its corsairs in 1784, 206. American 
captives in, 297. Jefferson fears for his 
daughter, 331. Piracies of, 636, 638. 

Alien Law, The. Passed, 551. Jefferson's 
opinion of, 553. 

Alston, Joseph. Marries Theodosia Burr, 765. 

Ames, Fisher. Quoted on the public debt, 
376. On the site for a capital, 394. His 
speech on the Jay treaty, 518. Upon Jeffer- 
son's administration, 634. 

Andrew, John. In affair of the Gaspee, 118. 

Annapolis. Visited by Jefferson in 1766, 68. 
Congress at, in 1783, 268. 

Appointments. Jefferson's policy with re- 
gard to, 605. 

Aristocracy. Jefferson dreads, 273, 274. 
Evils of, in France, 288, 335, 336. The 
true, 364. 

Arnold, Benedict. Invades Va., 243, 246. 
Denounced by Gerry, 543. 

Astor, J. J. Quoted upon Pacific coast, 320. 
In business at New York, 403. Founds 
Astoria, 676. 

Auburn, N.Y. Why bo named, 40. 
749 



750 



INDEX. 



Bacon, Edmund. Jefferson to, on fann oper- 
ations, 601. At Washington, 616. Re- 
ceives sheep for Jefferson, 627. Describes 
destruction of dam, 628. Conducts remov- 
al, 684. Upon the visitors at Monticello, 
688. Upon Jefferson's temper, 693. Upon 
the sale of Jefferson's library, 730. Leaves 
Monticello, 731. 

Ball, Joseph. Quoted on project of sending 
George Washington to sea as a sailor, 32. 

Ballooning. In 1784, at Philadelphia, 277. 

Baltimore. Aids Boston, 131. 

Bancroft, George. Quoted upon Mason, 208. 

Bank of U. 8. Established by Hamilton, 396. 

Baptists. Their petition to Burgesses of 
Va., 174. Persecuted in Va., 202-203. 
Defended by Patrick Henry, 204. 

Barbe-Marbois, Francois de. Questions Jef- 
ferson on Va., 260. Receives Notes on 
Virginia in reply, 260. Negotiates sale 
of Louisiana, 651-954. 

Bartlett, John Russell. Quoted upon the 
burning of the Gaspee, 118. 

Bartram, John. Becomes a botanist, 6. 
Corresponds with European botanists 6, 306. 

Beaumarchais, Caron de. His Marriage of 
Figarro produced, 290. 

Beckwith, Major. Upon Paine's pamphlet, 
424. 

Beecher, Henry Ward. His gift to Univer- 
Bity of Virginia, 711. 

Beecher, Dr. Lyman. A church-and-state 
man, 573. 

Bellew, Captain. Refused provisions in Va., 
185. 

Berwick, Mass. Aids Boston, 131. 

Bibby, Captain. Prisoner in Va., 222. 

Bible, The. Not a part of the Common Law, 
49. Jefferson upon, 338. 

Biddle, Owen. In excursion on the Dela- 
ware, 181. 

Black, Professor Joseph, 26. 

Blackstone, Sir William. Jefferson upon, 
48, 713. 

Blair, John. Governor of .Va., pro tern., 8b. 
Protects the Baptists, 204. 

Bland, Colonel Richard. Introduces bill to 
mitigate slavery, 97. On committee of cor- 
respondence, 124. Elected to Continental 
Congress, 143. Re-elected, 172. Excused 
and thanked, 173. In command of Bur- 
goyne prisoners, 237. 

Bleeding. Anecdote of, 68. 



Bompard, Captain. At Charleston, 470. 
At Philadelphia, 473. 

Bonaparte, Joseph. In Louisiana negotia- 
tion, 649. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon. Affects Republican 
methods, 370. His early career, 509. Dread- 
ed by Federalists, 571. Offended with Paine, 
583. Offends Paine, 591. Sells Louisiana 
to U. 8., 652. 

Bonvouloir, M. de. At Philadelphia, 183. 

Boston. Gifts to, during closing of the port, 
130. Jefferson indignant at wrongs of, 
139. Extols people of, 162. Jefferson at, in 
1784, 279. 

Boswell, James. Inventor of intei"viewing, 
146. 

Botetourt, Lord. Arrives in Va., 86. Opens 
Burgesses, 89, 93. Dissolves them, 94. 
Takes part w^ith Virginians, 96. Death of, 
97. 

Bracton, Henry de. His work upon law, 48. 

Brassy, Thomas. Upon the Maison Quarree, 
315. 

Brazil. An emissary from, meets Jefferson, 
321. 

Brooklyn, Mass. Aids Boston, 131. 

Brown, George. In affair of the Gaspee, 
118. 

Brown, John. Remark upon, 744. 

Brown, John, of Rhode Island. Heads attack 
upon the Gaspee, 113 to 116. 

Brown University. Why so named, 113. 

Bryant, William CuUen. His poem on the 
Embargo, 675, 690. 

Buckle, Henry Thomas. Quoted upon lei- 
sure, 29. Upon Spain, 397. 

Buffon, Count de. Jefferson supplies with 
specimens, 309, 310. 

Bull Run. Battle of, 181. 

Bunker Hill. Battle of, 162. News of, in 
Congress, 168. 

Burgesses, House of, in Va. Its manners and 
usages, 68, 71. How opened, 89. Dissolv- 
ed by Botetourt, 94. First assembled, 121. 
Summoned by Dunmore, 157, 158, 159. 
Abandoned by him, 160. Replies to Lord 
North, 160. 

Burgoyne, General. Effects of his surrender 
in Va., 220, 221. 

Burk, John. Quoted upon Small, 24. Upon 
Fauquier, 29. Upon religion in Va., 58. 
Upon Lord Botetourt's equipage, 89. Up- 
on witchcraft in Va., 202. 



INDEX. 



751 



Burke, Edmund. Causes publication in Eng- 
land of Jefferson's pamphlet, 142. His eu- 
logy of Marie Antoinette, 418. Denounces 
French Revolution, 419. Paine replies to, 
420. Misleads his country, 463. 

Burnaby, Rev. Andrew. Describes Wil- 
liamsburgh, 19. Quoted upon Fauquier, 
28. Upon people of Rhode Inland, 110. 

Burr, Aaron. Injured by association with 
French officers, 232. In the tie intrigues, 
576. Elected vice-president, 580. Seeks 
appointment from Jefferson, 663. His 
trial, 663. 

Burr, Thcodosia. Her marriage, 576. 

Burwell, Miss Rebecca. Jefferson in love 
■with, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. 

Cabfli,, Joseph C. Co-operates with Jeffer- 
son in founding the University of Virginia, 
701. . 

Caesar. His fidelity to Jefferson, 258. 

Callender, James T. Jefferson's connection 
•with, 6J6, 680. 

Calvinism. Jefferson detests, 711. 

Camden, S. C. Defeat at, in 1780, 242. 

Campaign Lies. Of 1800, 567. 

Campan, Madame Jeane Genet. Quoted 
upon the queen, 328. Her family and ca- 
reer, 461. 

Capet, Louis. See Louis XVI. 

Carlyle, Thomas. Upon French Revolution, 
134, 323. Upon Washington, 382. 

Carmichael, William. At Cadiz in 1785, 297. 

Carpenter's Hall. Congress sits in, 163. 

Carr, Dabney. Marries sister of Jefferson, 
44. Hears of the burning of the Gaspee, 
116, 119. Speaks in House of Burgesses, 
123, 124. Death of, 125. Allusion to, 271. 
Education of his sons, 276, 332, 338. 

Carr, Mrs. Dabney. Death of her husband, 
125. 

Carr, Peter. Jefferson advises, on morals, 
333. On religion, 338. 

Carrington, Colonel Edward. Hamilton to, 
on Jefferson, 435, 436. 

Carroll, Charles. Jefferson to, on Indian 
depredation, 413. 

Cary, Archibald. On committee of corre- 
spondence, 124. 

Catherine II. Frustrates Ledyard, 321. 
Compliments Burke, 420. 

Channing, Dr. W. E. His theology described, 
361. Jefferson upon, 711. 



Charles I. Hia letter to the Virginians, 121. 

Charleston, 8. C. Aids Boston, 132. Genet 
at, in 1793, 469. Importance of, then, 470. 

Charlmont, Mass. Aids Boston, 130. 

Chase, Judge Samuel. His trial, 6:17. 

Chastellux, Marquis de. Visits Monticello, 
262. Returning to France, 267. 

Chatterton, Thomas. Contributes to North 
Briton, 257. 

Chatham, Lord, 63. His veneration for 
George III., 136. Extols Congress, 163. 

Chesapeake, The. Fired into by the Leop- 
ard, 672. 

Christianity. Not part of the common law, 
50. Quoted upon aristocracy, 201. 

Church of England. Intolerant in Va., 202, 
210, 

Churches. Ruins of, in Va., 78. 

Cincinnati, The. Jefferson opposes, 273. 

Clerk, Rev. Archibald. His work upon 
Ossian, 103. 

Clarke, George Rogers. Takes Kaskaskias, 
2C2. Keeps Indians in check. 233. Cap- 
tures Vincennes, 234. Desires to attack 
Detroit, 237, 243. Assists in repelling Ar- 
nold, 247. His later life, 6J6. 

Clarke, General William. Employed by Jef- 
ferson, 606. Explores western country, 
628. 

Clay, Rev. Charles. Denounces Christmas 
fiddling, 13. Preaches on Fast Day, 130. 

Clay, Henry. His family in Va., 13, 58. 
Studies under Wythe, 29, 30, 31. His fa- 
thcr, 174. Quoted upon Jefferson and 
Mirabeau, 325. 

Clay, Rev. John, 174. 

Clergy, The. In Old Va., 55, 56. 

Clinton. DeWitt Clinton. His duel with 
Swartwout, 658. 

Clinton, George. His daughter marries Ge- 
net, 490. 

Clinton, Miss Cornelia. Married to Genet, 
490. 

Clinton, Sir Henry. Mitigates treatment of 
prisoners, 237. 

Coke upon Lyttleton. Jefferson studies, 34. 
Described, 47. Jefl'erson's opinion of, 48, 
63. 

Coles, Edward. Quoted upon Adams, 580. 

Cole, John. In affair of the Gaspee, 118. 

Collinson, Peter. Corresponds with Bar- 
tram, 5. His notices of the father of Jef- 
ferson's mother, 7. 



752 



INDEX. 



Committee of Correspondence, Origin of, 
124. 

Cooper, Peter. His father in New Yorli, 403. 

Cooper, Dr. Thomas. Uproar at his appoint- 
ment as professor, 707. 

Congress, The Continental. Proposed, 130. 
Instructed, 13G. Members elected to, in 
Va., 143. How paid, 162. Described, 163. 
Jefferson in, 164. Anecdote of, 166. De- 
clares Independence, 192. Meets at Annap- 
olis in 1783, 268. 

Connecticut. Blue Laws of, a forgery, 51. 
Jefl'crson's remarks upon, 339. 

Corbiii, Hon Richard. Pays for the stolen 
powder, 155. 

Cornwallis, Lord. In command at the South, 
231, 244. Ravages Jegerson's estate, 253. 
Surrenders, 259. 

Custom House. Exactions of, in London, 75, 
76. 

Dallas, G. J. In Genet affair, 483. 

Damicns, R F. His execution, 134. 

Dartmouth, Lord. In affair of the Gaspee, 
116, 118, 119. His reply concerning second 
petition, 179. 

Darwin, Charles. First man of his genera- 
tion, 744. 

Darwin, Erasmus. Friend of Dr. Small, 24. 

Davila, Henri. Discourses upon, by John 
Ad.-ims, 370. 

D.avis, John. Quoted upon inauguration of 
Jefferson, 587. 

Dawson, H. P. Quoted upon Genet, 403. 

Dearborn, General Henry. Slandered in 
1800, 572. Appointed secretary of war, 
598. His career, 597. Imports pigs, 027. 

Decimal currency. Perfected by Jefferson, 
239. Adopted by Congress, 399. 

Declaration of Independence. 188 to 193. 

De la Tude, M. A. Guest of Jefferson, 319. 

Delaware. Aids Boston in 1774, 13,'. 

Demosthenes. His use of forms still adhered 
to, 140. 

De Stael, Madame. Married, 319. 

Detroit. Henry Hamilton commands at, 230, 
233. Clarke desires to attack, 237. Retained 
by Great Britain after the Revolution, 402. 

Dickinson, John. In Congress, 164. De- 
ferred to by Congress, 105, lb6. The king's 
opinion of, K,7. Pens draft, 168, 170. 

Digges, Dudley. On committee of corre- 
Bpondencc, 124. 



Dilke, Sir Charles. Behavior of Tories to, 
421. 

Dix, Governor John A. Upon Jefferson's 
playing, 222. 

Doddridge, Dr. Philip, 14. 

Dominica. Aids Boston, 132. 

Dorchester, Lord. In command in Canada, 
412. 

Dorset, Duke of. Jefferson friendly to, 319. 

Douglass, Rev. William. Jefferson attends 
his school, 14. 

Drayton, Wiliiam. Jefferson to, on the ol- 
ive, 307. 

Dubuque, M. Pike meets, on Mississippi, 629. 

Dudington. Lieut. His vessel burnt at New- 
port, 111. Wounded, 114. 

Dunmore, Lord. Replaces Botetourt, 122. 
His proclamation derided, 151, 152. Seizes 
the powder, 152. Pays for it, 155. Sum- 
mons Burgesses, 157. Runs away, 160. 
Asks for a fleet, 179. Invites slaves to join 
him, 183. 

D'Yrujo, Seiior. Sells wine to Jefferson, 626. 

Eacker, George I. His duels with Price 
and Hamilton, 658. 

Earle, T. Hamilton benefits, 431. 

Eaton, William. His negotiation with Bey 
of Tunis, 638. 

Education. Jefferson's bills to promote, in 
Va., 216. His labors in beh.ilf of, 700. 

Ellery, William. Signs treaty of i^e.ace, 269. 

Embargo, The. Of 1807, 674. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. How defrauded, 
630. 

Entail. Abolished in Va., 209. 

Eppes, Francis. Elected major, 174. 

Eppes, Francis, jun. At Monticello, 694. 

Eppes, John W. With Jefferson at Philadel- 
phia, 451. Engaged, 605. Buying horses, 
587. 

Eppes, Maria Jefferson. Going to France, 
330, 332. At Paris, 333. Return home, 345. 
Engaged, 505. Her death, 678. 

Etinuctte. Of president's house in Washing- 
ton's time, 365,367, 368. In Jefferson's, 614. 

Falmodth, Mass. Aids Boston, 132. Burnt, 

185. 
Farmington, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 
Fauquier, Francis. His character and habits, 

27, 28, 29, 82. Death, 85. Incorruptible, 

110. 



INDEX. 



753 



Federalists, The. Described by Freneau, 
444. Their downfall, 580. Virulent 
against President Jefferson, 633, Assail 
him in retirement, 6S9. 

Federalist, The. How written, 362. 

Fenno, John. Alarmed at Discourses upon 
Davila, 371. Tone of his paper, 433. At- 
tacks Freneau, 434. Hamilton's contribu- 
tions to, 445. 

Field, Da\-id Dudley, 46 

Fine, John. Quoted, 368. 

France. Sends emissary to Continental Con- 
gress, 182, 1S3. AlUance with, 197. Rati- 
fied by Va., 229. Not an unmixed good, 
230, 261. Jefferson's impressions of, in 1785, 
288. His attachment to, 337. Embroglio 
with in 179S, 539, 550. 

Free Trade. Jefferson recommends, 292, 293, 
340, 413. 

French Revolution. Jefferson's part in, 318, 
323, 326. Effect of, upon the world, 372. 
John Adams's opinion of, 372. Effect on 
politics of United States, 417. Burke upon, 
418. Paine upon, 421. Paine in, 454. Ham- 
ilton upon, 456. 

Franklin, Dr. Benjamin. In Congress, 163, 
164. Obstructs the Delaware, 181, 277. 
Meets French emissary, 182. Effect upon, 
of the burning of Norfolk and Falmouth, 
185. Anecdote of, 188. Jefferson Ukes, 
197. Jefferson to, on change of government 
in Va., 219. His reception of Mazzei, 228. 
Upon ballooning in 1784, 276, 277. To Ad- 
ams on their new duties in 1784, 280. Leav- 
ing France, 283, 284. His excellence as a 
diplomatist, 285. Riunor of his capture, 
296. Anecdote of, 309, 313. Last inter- 
view with Jefferson, 248. With Priestley, 
498. Upon value of Mississippi river, 
641. 

Frederick 11., of Prussia, makes treaty with 
Congress, 282. 

Freneau, Captain Philip. Jefferson appoints, 
432. Sets up newspaper, 433. Attacks 
Hamilton, 434, 444. Hamilton attacks, 445. 

Frj-, Professor Joshua. Associated with Pe- 
ter Jefferson in making early map of Va., 
9, 241. 

Fulton, Robert. Employed by Bonaparte, 
584. 

Gage, General Thomas. Warned by Va., 
144, 145. • Precipitates war, 152. 



Galileo. Right in recanting, 513. 
Gallatin, Abraham Albert Alphonso. Re- 
port of his murder, 292. Menaced by Al- 
len Law, 551. Appointed Secretary of the 
Treasury, 594. His career, 595. Jefferson 
to, on reducing his department, 613. Jef- 
ferson to, on the silver mines, 629. 

Gaspee, The. Burnt in Narragansett Bay, 
109 to 114. 

Gates, General Horatio. In command at 
South, 240. Defeated at Camden, 242. . 

Genet, Edmond. Coming as minister to U. 
S., 459, 460. His early life, 461. At Charles- 
ton, 469. At Philadelphia, 471. Interviews 
with official persons, 478, 484. Recalled, 
489. Marriage, 490. 

Gerry, Elbridge. Jefferson meets, at New 
York in 1776, 68. Signing Declaration of 
Independence, 192. His poverty during 
the war, 226. Signs treaty of peace, 269. 
Jefferson to, in 1784, on Boston, 279. In em- 
bassy to France, 541. His poverty during 
Revolution, 542. Exposes Benedict Arnold, 
543. In Paris, 544. Converses with Tal- 
leyi-and, 548. Recalled, 550. Visits Presi- 
dent Adams, 560. Restores peace between 
France and the U. S., 561. Jefferson to, 
on his political system, 564. 

George IV. ConipUment to, 135. As a boy, 
167. As a man, 316, 317. 

George III. Succeeds to the throne, 28. • An 
expensive king, 115. Dismembered Brit- 
ish empire, 135, 137. His family life, 166. 
His opinion of American patriots, 167. Jef- 
ferson upon, 180, 189. Jefferson presented 
to, 312. Jefferson upon, 316. Speech to 
John Adams, 406. His antipathy to the 
United States, 410. Pensions Burke, 419. 
His birthday at Philadelphia, 475. 

George, Lake. Jefferson upon, 425. 

Georgia. Aids Boston, 132. 

Goodrich, Chauncey. Quoted upon level- 
ling, 374. 

Goodrich, G. G. Quoted upon manners, 584. 

Gr.aham, George. Detects Burr, 665. 

Granger, Gideon. Appointed postmaster- 
general, 599. 

Grange, The. Captured, 470. 

Great Britain. Reduced in importance by 
the American Revolution, 157, 177. Her 
protective system, 414. 

Greeley, Horace. Publishes a letter of Jef. 
ferson's, 626. 



754 



INDEX. 



Grimm, Baron. Jefferson knew, 319. As- 
sists Ledyard, 320. 
Grotou, Mass. Aids Boston, 130, 132. 

HAiiE, Sir Matthew. Jefferson upon, 50. 

Hall, Lieut. Francis. Relates visit to Monti- 
cello, 719. 

Hall, Rev. Robert. Quoted upon Priestley, 
500. 

Hamilton, Alexander. Corrupted by French 
officers, 262. His early career in U. S., 352. 
His self-sufficiency, 353. His politics, 363. 
Upon etiquette of President's house, 365. 
His bet with Q. Morris, 369. Meets Jeffer- 
son, 374. Appointed Secretary of the 
Treasury, 377, 3S3. Reports on the Pub- 
lic Debt, 383. Inclined toward England, 
411, 412, Opposes tariff retaliation, 414. 
Differences with Jefferson, 423, 430. Ami- 
able at home, 431. Talleyrand upon, 431. 
Ignorant of America, 432. Has two fami- 
lies to mamtaiu, 431. Accuses Jefferson and 
Madison of cabal, 435, 436. His opinion of 
the British constitution, 438. A lobbyist, 
439. Attacks Jefferson in the press, 445. 
Defends his course, 4S7. A monarchist, 
450. Upon French Revolution, 456, 458. 
Upon reception of Genet, 460, 466. Toast- 
ed at English banquet, 475. Against Ge- 
net's proceedings, 479, 486, 488. His amour 
with Mrs. Reynolds, 534. His scheme to 
invade South ^\merica, 551. His political 
programme for 1799, 558. Intrigues John 
Adams out of the presidency, 562. Attacks 
Jefferson in 1800, 568. During the tie in- 
trigues, 580. Retires from politics, 582. 
His complicated methods, 613. Upon Jef- 
ferson's administration, 634. His evil in- 
fluence, 742. 

Hamilton, Henry. Stirs up Indians to attack 
western settlements, 230, 233. A prisoner, 
234. Released, 236. 

Hamilton, Mrs. Alexander. At home, 431. 
Benefits a poor artist, 431. Her husband 
false to, 481. 

Hamilton, Philip. His duel with Backer, 658. 

Hammond, George. English minister at 
Philadelphia, 414. In conference with Jef- 
ferson, 418. His marriage, 475. Remon- 
strates against Genet, 478. 

Hancock, John. Proscribed in England, 142. 
Signs address to people of England, 171. 
Aaecdotc of, 191. John Adams upon, 428. 



Harrison, Benjamin. On committee of cor- 
respondence, 124. Elected to Continental 
Congress, 143. On committee to arm Va., 
150. In Congress, 166, 171. Re-elected, 
172. Anecdote of, 192. Sent to Congress 
for arms, 249. Washington to, on New 
York canal, 272. 

Hartford. Aids Boston, 131. 

Hiiy, George. In trial of Burr, 669. 

Helps, Sir Arthur. Quoted upon Brassy, 315. 

Henings, Madison. Does not know his own 
father, 569. i 

Henings, Sally. Mistake respecting, 569. 

Hening's Statutes at Large. Contributed to 
by Jefferson, 84. 

Henry Patrick. A player upon the \'iolin, 
12. First meeting with Jefferson, 18. Ad- 
mitted to bar, 33. Dabney Carr his only 
rival, 45. In the clergy case, 55. Borrows 
books of Jefferson, 60. Member of House 
of Burgesses, 64. Opposes Stamp Act, 65, 
66. Denounces the loan bill, 80. Compar- 
ed with Jefferson, 83. At dissolution of 
House of Burgesses, 94. In consultation 
upon Gaspee affair, 119, 124. Promotes 
Fast Day, 129. An indolent reader, 142. 
Proscribed in England, 142. Elected to 
Congress in 1774, 143, 445. In Va. Con- 
vention of 1775, 149. On Committee to arm 
Va., 150. At the head of troops gels paid 
for the stolen powder, 154, 155. 

Hessians, The. Prisoners in Va., 221, 223, 
228, 244. 

Hillegas, Michael. His love of music, 181. 

Hillsborough, Earl of, 96. 

Hitchcock, Mr. In affair of the Gaspee, 118. 

Hone, Philip. Raises money for Jefferson, 
731. ' 

Hopkins, Captain John. Reads Declaration 
of Independence, 192. 

Hopkins, Chief Justice. In affair of the Gas- 
pee, 112. 

Hopkinson, Francis. Jefferson- to, on his 
Notes, 310. 

Hume, David. His Essay on Miracles, 60. 
His History of England, 713. 

Humphries, Colonel David. In Paris with 
Jefferson, 333. Jefferson recalls, 609. 

Hutchinson, Governor. Upon the burning 
of the Gaspee, 116. 

Impressment.. Barbarity of, 416. 
Independence. Virginia decides for, 18S. 



INDEX. 



755 



Debates upon, 187. Declaration of, written 
by Jefferson, 188. Declared, 191. 

Indians. Jefferson's liking for, 10. At Wil- 
liam and Mary College, 21. 

Inoculation. Jefferson undergoes, 67. Sub- 
jects his family to it, 266. 

International Copyright. Remarks upon, 
630. 

Iredell, Judge. Extols Ames's speech, 519. 

Irving, Washington. Retained for Burr, 666. 

Isaacs, Mr. His experiment with salt water, 
398. 

Jackson, Andrew. Described, 353. Desires 
governorship of Louisiana, 656. 

Jackson, Francis. Describes Washington, 
D.C., 616. BQs first conference with Madi- 
son, 618. 

Jackson, George. Upon speculation in cur- 
rency, 390. Upon the site for a capital, 
394. 

Jay, John. Ift Congress, 163. Hostile to R. 
H. Lee, 169. Vain of his writings, 169. 
Meets French emissary, 182. In Paris, 266, 
267. Sends commission to Jefferson, 283. 
Reports upon the Algerine captives, 300. 
Promotes exporlation of flour, 325. Upon 
government, 373. Consulted by Washing- 
ton, 380. On the treaty of peace, 406. Dis- 
approves Paine's reply to Burke, 427. 
Negotiates treaty with England, 614, 516. 
Rejects iidvice of Hamilton, 562. 

Jay Treaty, The. Signed, 517. 

Jefferson, George, Declines a federal ap- 
pointment, 60S. 

Jefferson, Jane. Wife o£ Peter Jefferson. 
Her marriage, 6. Allusion to, 36. Burnt 
out, 98. Death of, 186. 

Jefferson, Lucy. Her death, 330. 

Jefferson, Miss Jane. Her singing, 12. 
Death, 45. 

Jefferson, Peter. His farm and home, 2. 
His person and character, 3. Marriage, 5. 
Strength, 8. Assists Fry to make map of 
Va., 10. Trains negroes, 11. Educates his 
son, 14. Death, 15. 

Jefferson, Randolph. His inheritance, 31. 

Jefferson, Thomas. His person at seventeen, 
1. Birth, 5. Boyhood, 10, 11, 12. Plays 
the violin, 13. Attends Maury's school, 17. 
Enters college, 20. At CoUege, 23, 26. Es- 
capes vices of Va., 30. Begins law, 32. 
In love, 34 to 40. Of age, 42. Methodical 



and exact, 43. As a law student, 46. 
Sworn in as vestryman, 59. His course of 
study, 61. Hears Patrick Henry, 65. Jour- 
ney northward, 67. Inoculated, 68. Prac- 
tises law, 69, 72, 80, 81;82, 83. Elected to 
House of Burgesses, 88. Takes part in 
proceedings, 92. Supports bill to mitigate 
slavery, 97. His house burned, 98. Mar- 
ries, 101. Sends for Ossian manuscripts, 
102. Consults on Gaspee affair, 119, 123. 
On committee of correspondence, 124. 
Buries Carr, 126. Recommends fast-day, 
129, 130. Draughts instructions for members 
of Continental Congress, 136. They are 
published in England, 142. Retires from 
the bar, 147. His order for English sashes, 
148. Chairman of committee of safety, 148. 
On committee to get arms for Va., 150. 
Elected member of the Continental Con- 
gress, 151. Clings to England, 157. Re- 
plies to North, 159. In Continental Con- 
gress, 162. Urges Livingston to pen draught, 
169. Draws it himself, 170. Ke-elected to 
Congress, 172. Buys violin of John Ran- 
dolph, 176. Meets Fi'ench emmissary, 182. 
Writes Declaration of Independence, 188, 
Retires from Continental Congress, 194. 
Declines French mission, 198. Reforms 
laws of Va., 201, 210. Defends freedom of 
thinking, 211. Attentive to Hessian pris- 
oner, 222, 223, 224. Elected goveror of Va., 
226. Sworn in, 229. Retaliates ill-treatment 
of prisoners, 236. Re-enforces Gates, 241, 
242. His conduct during Arnold's invasion, 
246, 248. Driven from Monticello, 252. 
Retires from governorship, 255. Smarts 
under censure, 258. Declines a mission to 
France, 258. To Monroe and Lafayette, on 
the supposed censure, 259. Thanked by 
legislature of Va., 260. Writes Notes upon 
Virginia, 260. Visited by Chast^iUux, 262. 
Loses his wife, 266. Elected peace com- 
missioner to France, 266. In Congress at 
Annapolis, 268. Perfects our decimal cur- 
rency, 269. Washington to, on canal sys- 
tem, 272. Objects to the Cincinnati, 273. 
Letters to his daughter at school, 274. Ac- 
cepts mission to Europe, 276. In Paris, 
280. Appointed plenipotentiary to France, 
283. Impressions of Paris, 287. His labors 
there, 292. Treats with the Algerines, 298, 
Sends rice and olives to S.C, 307, 309. 
Supplies Buffon with specimens, 309. Visit 



756 



INDEX. 



to England, 312. Tour in Europe, 314. 
His part iu French Revolution, 318, 323, 327. 
His connection -witli Ledyar J, 320. Rescues 
his daughter from a convent, 334. Leaving 
France, 335. Appointed secretary of state, 
342. Accepts, 345. Welcome home, 344. 
Takes office in New York, 349. First im- 
pressions, 364. Meets Hamilton, 374, 383. 
Helps him to a majority in Congress, 392, 
395. Opposed to his finance, 386. Recom- 
mends mint, 399. Resides at Philadelphia, 
400. His oj^inion on passage of British 
troops, 412. Favors tariff retaliation, 414. 
Committed hy Paine's pamphlet, 423, 425. 
Excursion to Lake Champlain, 425. Op- 
poses bank, 428. Quarrel with Hamilton, 
430. Appoints Freneau, 432. Discloses 
his intention to retire, 441. Hamilton at- 
tacks, in the press, 445. To Washington, 
on Hamilton, 448. His estate in 1793,452. 
Washington urges upon him mission to 
France, 459. Upon reception of Genet, 
467. Upon Genet's conduct, 471, 480, 483. 
Interview with Genet, 484. Against violent 
measures, 486. Resigns, 492. His corre- 
spondence with Hammond and Genet pub- 
lished, 493. A Democrat in practice, 495. 
Promotes scheme of western exploration, 
495. As a farmer, 501. Visited by Roche- 
foucauld, 503. Gets medal for a plough, 
507. Invited to return to cabinet, 510. 
Candidate for the presidency, 510, 512. 
On Jay treaty, 520. Elected vice-president, 
524. Composes manual, 527. Adams con- 
sults, 629. Attends banquet, 530. Part of 
letter to Mazzei published, 533. Urges 
Gerry to accept mission to France, 541. 
On Alien and Sedition Laws, 553, 554. To 
John Taylor, against secession, 555. To 
Gerry on, his political system, 564. In 
campaign of 1800, 565. To Nolan, on wild 
horses, 565. Invents revolving chair, 566, 
Lies respecting, in 1800, 668. During the 
tie intrigues, 576. Elected president, 580. 
Inaugurated, 586. His first letters, 588, 
589. Eulogizes Madison, 594. Methods of 
Ms administration, 605. Buys Louisiana. 
642. Repels Burr, 663. Frustrates Burr's 
expedition, C65. Recommends embargo, 
674. Corresponds with Mrs. Adams, 678. 
Upon death of his daughter Maria, 678. 
Retiring from presidency, 683. Overrun 
by visitors, 689. His alarm at the Missouri 



question, 698. His opinions respecting sla- 
very, 698. Founds University of Virginia, 
703. His habits in old age, 714. Visited by 
Lafayette, 727. Sells his library to Con, 
gross, 730. Impoverished, 731. Death, 
734. Summary of his life and character, 
737. 

Jefl'erson, Mrs. Thomas. Marriage of, 101. 
Character and habits, 105, 106. Birlh of 
her daughter Martha, 107. Her children, 
126. Anecdote of, 128. Prevents Jeffer- 
son's acceptance of French mission, 197. 
Her ill-health, 219. Attentive to Hessian 
prisoners, 221, 222. Her letter to ladies of 
Va., 241. Entertains ChastcUux, 262, 263. 
Death of, 265. Mourned by her husband, 
287. 

Jesus Christ. Jefferson's remarks upon, 338. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel. Influences Jefferson's 
style, 38. Denounces Ossian, 39. 

Johnson, Sir William. At Saratoga, 425. 

Johnson, Thomas. His gift to University of 
Virginia, 710. 

Jouitte, Mr. Warns Jefferson of British 
troops, 251. 

Journalism. An infant art, 146. 

Junius. Remarks upon, 257. 

Kaskaskias. Taken by Clarke, 233. 

King, Rufus. Discloses transfer of Louisi- 
ima, 642, 

Kinglake, A. W. Quoted*, 191. 

Kings. How regarded formerly, 134, 135, 136. 

Knox, General Henry. Quoted on an army 
toast, 351. Upon government, 373. Ap- 
pointed Secretary of war, 378, 379. In cab- 
inet, 458. On Genet, 486, 488, 489. 

Kosciuszko, General Thaddeus. Driven 
from U. S. by Alien Law, 551, 590. 

LArAYETTE, General. Applauds Jefferson 
in 1781, 258. Forwards a letter to him, 258. 
Jefl'erson to, on the public censure, 259. 
Assists Jefferson in France, 294, 295. Jef- 
ferson to, on the French peasantry, 316. 
His political dinner at Jefferson's house, 
326. Sends key of Bastille to Washington, 
422. Jefl'erson meditates appointing him 
governor of Louisiana, 656. Visits Monti- 
cello, 727. 

Langdon, John. In Congress, 164. 

Law, John. Hamilton borrows from, 358, 
386, 389, 396. 



INDEX. 



757 



Laws. Of ancient England, 49, 50. Of Old 
Virginia, 52, 70, 71, 84, 199. 

Lawyers. In Va., 46, 47. Ancient, 47,48, 69 
to 73. Thrown out of employment in 1774, 
in Va., 146. 

Leander, The, Fires into an American vessel, 
672. 

Lear, Tobias. Assists "Washington to raise 
money, 377. Quoted upon Paine's pam- 
phlet, 424, 425. 

Lebanon, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 

Ledyard, John. His scheme of exploration, 
320. 

Lee, Arthur. Accuses Bland, 173. Dispu- 
tations, 268. 

Leeds, Duke of. In conference with G. Mor- 
ris, 409, 410. 

Lee, Henry. Befriends Freneau, 473. Ad- 
vises Genet, 477. A tale-bearer, 521. 

Lee, Francis Lightfoot. In consultation up- 
on Gaspee affair, 119. Aids to reform Va., 
214. 

Lee, Richard Henry. In consultation upon 
Gaspee affair, 119, 124. His bill against 
slave trade, 139. Elected to Continental 
Congress, 143, 144. On committee to arm 
Va., 150. In Congress, 164. Re-elected, 
172. Signs Jefferson's commission, 283. 
Jefferson gets a lamp for, 304. 

L'Embuscade. At Charleston, 469, 470. 

LesUe, General A. Co-operates with Corn- 
wallis, 244. 

Letters. Their use as material of biography, 
41. 

Lewis, Meriwether. Private Secretary to 
Jefferson, 023. His exploring expedition, 
628. 

Lexington. Battle of, 153, 156. 

Liberty, The. Burnt at Newport, 111. 

Lincoln, Abraham. His definition of slavery, 
655. 

Lincoln, Levi. Takes possession of the ofBce 
of secretary of state, 586. Appointed at- 
torney-general, 598. 

LTnfant, Major. His mission to France, 274. 

Little Sarah, The. Captured, 470. 

Livingston, R. R. On committee to draught 
Declaration of Independence, 187. Minis- 
ter to France, 599. Why recalled, 606. 
Sends sheep to Jefferson, 626. Negotiates 
for purchase of Louisiana, 643, 654. 

Livingston, William. In Congress, 164. Jef- 

«ferson urges to pen draught, 169. 



Logan, Dr. George. His attempt to preserve 
peace between France and U. 8., 552. 

Logic, Charles. His generosity to American 
captives in Algiers, 297. 

London. Sends aid to Boston in 1774, 132. 

Louis XV. In affair of D.amiens, 134. 

Louis XVI. His inconvenient virtue, 328. 
Paine tries to save, 454. Executed, 455. 

Louisiana. Purchase of, 641. 

Lyttleton, Lord. His work upon law, 47. 

McCleod, Captain. Protects Monticcllo, 258. 

Macon, Nathaniel. Jefferson consults, 607. 

MacPherson, Charles. Jefferson knows, 40. 
Jefferson asks to send Ossiau MSS., and 
Gaelic works, 102. 

Madison, James. Remembered Braddock'a 
defeat, 16. Why he entered Princeton, 25. 
Escaped vices of Va., 30. His excessive 
study, 60. Advised by Jefferson as to his 
studies, 61, 62. Upon Jefferson as a speak- 
er, 83. Lost election by refusing to can- 
vass, 88. 'Upon uitoleranco of the church 
in Va., 202, 203. His character and career, 
208. Aids to reform Va., 208, 210. To 
Jefferson on public affairs in 1780, 238. 
Upon Jefferson's election to France, 266. 
Disappointed in love, 270. Jefferson urges 
to settle near Montlcello, 271. Guardian 
of Jefferson's nepliew, 276. Jefferson to, 
upon France, 289. Jefferson gets a watch 
for, 304. Jefferson to, on architecture, 305. 
On accepting office, 317. Visits Jefferson 
in 1790, 345. Jefferson to, on Fi-ench Revo- 
lution, 351. To Jefferson on the new gov- 
ernment, 376. Cordial with Hamilton in 
1789, 383. His difference with Hamilton, 
391. On site for a capital, 394. With Jef- 
ferson on an excursion, 425. Advances 
Freneau, 432. Hamilton accuses, 436. Jef- 
ferson to, on Genet, 403. On his desire to 
resign, 492. On beginning of Adams's pres- 
idency, 523. Proposed as minister to France, 
531. Urged by Jefferson to write, 554. 
Appointed secretary of state, 592. His ca- 
reer, 593. Presents Merry to Jeffei'son, 619. 
Imports sheep, 626. Pigs, 672. In negotia- 
tion for purchase of Louisiana, 643. Jef- 
ferson to, on impending war, 673. Jefferson- 
defends, 687. Upon the University of Vir- 
ginia, 706. Impoverished, 742. 

Madison, Colonel John. After Braddock's 
defeat, 15. His death, 592. 



758 



INDEX. 



Madison, Mrs. James. Her poverty, 742. 

Madison, Professor James. Observes the 
■winds, 2G3. 

Magna Charta. Source of liberal politics, 47, 
48, 71. Virginians attached to, 121. 

Maison Quarree. At ISTismes, 305, 315, 322. 

Mansfield, Lord. Jefferson disapproves, 48. 

Marbois, M. de. See BarbCiMarbois. 

Marblchead, Mass. Aids Boston, 131. 

Marie Antoinette. Her high play, 316. Jef- 
ferson's opinion of, 328. Quoted upon the 
American Revolution, 417. Burke eulo- 
gizes, 418. Advances Genet, 461, 462. 

Marriage. Remarks upon, 3, 103. 

Marselliiise, The. Sung in Philadelphia thea- 
tres, 456. 

Marshall, John. Quoted upon Jefferson, 493. 
To France in grand embassy, 541, 549, 550. 
Anecdote of, 58G. Dines with Burr, 666. 
In trial of Burr, 639. 

Martm, Luther. Defends Burr, 666, 66S. 

Martin. Receives British troops at Monti- 
cello, 258. 

Maryland. Aids Bos'ton, 131. 

Mason, George. Aids to reform Va., 207, 
214. His opinion of Hamilton, 352. 

Mason, Rev. John. Quoted upon Jefferson, 
571. Upon Bonaparte, 571. 

Massachusetts Historical Society. Public 
obligations to, 133. ' 

Massachusetts. Asks co-operation of Va., 
85. Virginia imitates, 95, 123. Jefferson 
extols, 162, 702. 

M.ithurius, The. Employed to ransom Amer- 
ican captives, 300. 

Maury, James, jun. Consul to Liverpool, 
17. 

Maury, Rev. James. Jefferson attends his 
school, 16. 

Maury, Rev. Mr. Marries Martha Jefferson, 
346. 

Mazzei, Philip. Settles near Monticello, 104. 
Supplies Jefferson's garden, 105. To Eu- 
rope for a loan, 227, 229. In Paris, 329. 
Publishes extract from Jefferson's letter, 
533. Anecdote of, 573. 

Meade, Colonel R. K. Attached to Hamilton, 
354. 

Meade, William. Quoted upon industry of 
Old Virgiuia, 11. Upon the Washingtons, 
32. Upon the clergy of Va., 55, 56, 57, 59. 

Medicine men. Jefferson describee, 677. 

Merchants. Jefferson dislikes, 339. 



Merry, Mr. His reception by Jefferson, 618, 

621. 

Mexico. Jefferson discourages revolution in, 
322. 

Michaud, Andrew. Attempts to explore 
west, 495. 

Miflain, Governor. In Genet affair, 483, 486. , 
His reception of Jefferson at Philadelphia, 
527, 528. 

Miller, Samuel. His gift to University of 
Virginia, 710. 

Mint. Established at Philadelphia, 398. 

Mirabeau, Count Honor^. Jefferson ad- 
mired, 325. 

Miranda, Don Francisco. His scheme of 
South American independence, 551. 

Monroe, Colonel James, 14. 

Monroe, James. His father, 14. Ad\ised by 
Jefferson as to his studies, 61, 62. In the 
field in 1781, 252. Jefferson to, on the cen- 
sure, 259. Buying laud near Monticello, 
270, 271. Jefferson to, on France, 287. 
Jeffcrsou to, on need of a navy, 351. Jef- 
ferson to, on deadlock in Congress, 395. On 
Paine, 427. Builds house near Jefferson, 
507. Minister to France, 522. Assists 
Paine, 523. Why not a graduate of a col- 
lege, COO. Minister in London, 621. To 
Paris for purchase of Louisiana, 650, 653, 
654. Negotiates treaty with England, 672. 
Reconciled to Madison, 687. 

Monticello. Why chosen for a residence, 44. 
Jefferson goes to live at, 98. Improves, 99, 
103, 106. Described, 106. Seized by Tarl- 
ton, 252. Visited by Chastellux, 262. The 
prevalent winds there, 263. 

Montmorin, Count de. Conference with Jef- 
ferson, 340. 

Moody, Samuel. Sends aid to Boston, 182. 

Moore, Thomas. His verses upon Jefferson, 
605. His intei-view with Jefferson, 612. 
Jefferson enjoys his poetry, 621. 

Montague, Admiral. In affair of the Gaspee, 
116, 117, 119. 

Montague, Captain. Threatens to fire upon 
Williamsburg, 158. 

Montreal. Aids Boston, 131. 

Morris, Gouverneur. Suggests decimal cur- 
rency, 269. His character, 294. At Jeft'er- 
son's house in Paris, 320, 328. Assists 
French nobles, 328. Quoted upon nobility 
in France, 329. His bet with Hamilton, 
369. Envoy to England, 408. Upon Hanj- 



INDEX. 



759 



ilton's opinions, 450. In Paris during reign 
of terror, 457. Replaced by Monroe, 522. 
Visits Mt. Vernon, 502. Interviews Jeffer- 
son on the tie, 577. His opinion tliereon, 
580. Describes Washington, D.C., 601. 
Upon Jefferson's administration, 633, 650. 
Upon Monroe's appointment to France, 671. 

Morris, Robert. Signs treaty of peace, 269. 
His tobacco contract with France, 293, 294. 
Hamilton to, on finance, 358, 359. In New 
York in 17S9, 367. Recommends Hamilton, 
377. 

Morris, William. Killed by Indians, 234. 

Moultrie, G-overnor W. In Genet affair, 
470. 

Moustier, Count de. Jefferson to, on Louisi- 
ana, 642. 

Muhlenberg, General J. P. G-. Jefferson to, 
on his wine duty, 626. 

Narragansett Bay. Scenes in, before Rev- 
olution, 108 to 116. 

Natural Bridge. Owned by Jefferson, 103. 
Visited by ChastcUux, 264. 

Naturalization. Tenns of, 213. 

Necker, Jacques. Gets flour from U. S., 325. 

Negroes, The. Jefferson's opinion of, 199. 

Nelson, Thomas. Elected to Congress, 172. 
Despatched to eastern counties, 240, 246. 
Governor of Va., 255. 

Nemour, Dupont de. Jefferson to, on Loui- 
siana purchase, 646. 

New England. Early laws of, 51. Prosperi- 
ty of, 77. Ought not to have been so 
named, 120. Enriched by commerce in 
slaves, 190. How its men were ftrmed, 
195. Sides against the embargo, 674. Re- 
marks upon, 700. 

New Hampshire. Aids Boston, 132. 

New Jersey. Aids Boston, 131. 

Newport, R. I. Commerce of, before Revolu- 
tion, loS, 109. Scenes at. 111, 112, 117. 
Aids Boston, 132. ^Illusion to, 388. 

Newspapers. Jefferson upon, in 1787, 317. 

New York, City of. Visited by Jefferson in 
1766, 68. Aids Boston in 1774, 132. Inde- 
pendence declared at, 193. Society of, in 
1790, 364, 307, 368. Beginning of rapid 
gro'wth, 396. Congress removes from, 400. 

Nicholas, George. Confers with Jefferson on 
Kentucky Resolutions, 558. 

Nicholas, R. C. On committee with Jeffer- 
son, 92, 124. Quietsthe people, 153. Elect- 
50 



ed chairman of Burgesses of Va., 174. 

His politics, 209. 
Nicholas, W. C. Confers with Jefferson, 558. 
Noailles, Vicompto de. At Philadelphia, 477. 
Norfolk, Va. Burnt by the Enghsh, 185. 

Jefferson at, in 1789, 342. 
North Carolina. Aids Boston, 131, 
North, Lord. Comes to the premiership, 97. 

His proposition to the colonies, 159. 
Norwich, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 
Notes upon Virginia. Written by Jefferson, 

260. Published, 310. 

Olives. Jefferson's efforts to introduce into 
the U. S., 307. 

Ontassete. His oratory, 10. 

Orleans, Duke of. G. Morris assists, 328. 

Osgood, Dr. David. Assails Jefferson, 690. 

Ossian. Jefferson loves, 39. Gives name to 
a town, 40. Jefferson intends to read him 
in the original, 102. Recent light on, 103, 
Jefferson and ChastcUux converse upon, 263. 

Otis, J. Upon British protective system, 275. 

Owen, Robert Dale. Alluded to, 631. 

Paca, WilUam. In Congress, 163. 

Page, John. At college, 24. Jefferson to, 
upon his love, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38. His house, 
36. Marriage, 41. Jefferson to, on Dab- 
ncy Carr, 44. Advises Dunmore, 155,157. 
In House of Burgesses, 175. Devises seal 
for Va., 193. Candidate for governor of 
Va., 225. Jefferson to, m 1785, 287. Sec- 
ond marriage in New York, 349. Jefferson 
appoints to office, 608. 

Paine, Thomas. His Common Sense pub- 
lished, 186. Quoted, 190. Gives a year's 
salary to the Revolution, 238. Jefferson to, 
on the press, 317. Hamilton reijlies to his 
Common Sense, 354. Replies to Burke on 
French Revolution, 421. Forwards key of 
Bastille to Washington, 422. His pamphlet 
in United States, 423, 425, 426. Jefferson 
to, on the same, 427. Defended by Fre- 
neau, 434. Endeavors to save Louis XVI. 
Burnt in effigy at Bristol, 476. Befriended 
in Paris by Monroe, 523. Gives money 
toward French invasion of England, 549. 
Offends Bonaparte, 583. Permitted to re- 
turn to U.S. in a naval ship, 590. His abode 
in Paris, 590. Remarks upon, 591, 606. 

Pardoning Power. How exercised by Jeflfer- 
6on, 632. 



760 



INDEX. 



Parish, John. G. Morris to, on Jefferson, 671. 

Payson, Edward. Assails Jefferson, 690. 

Pendleton, Edmund. On committee of cor- 
respondence, 12-t. Elected to Continental 
Congress, 143. On committee to arm Va., 
150. Thanked by Burgesses, 172. His 
dexterity in debate, 209, 213, 215. 

Pcpperill, Mass. Aids Boston, 130. 

Philadelphia. Sends aid to Boston in 1774, 
132. Continental Congress meets at, 163. 
Defended by galleys, 181. Lead collected 
from house to house, 1S6. Seat of general 
government, 395. Congress removes to, 
400. Scenes at, in 1793, 470. 

Phillips, General William. A prisoner in 
Va., 222. Remonstrates on behalf of Hen- 
rj' Hamilton, 236. 

Philosophical Society. Jefferson sending his 
Notes to, 310. Members of, witness an 
experiment, 397. Sends Michaud to explore 
west, 495. 

Pickering, Timothy. Upon Botetourt's coach, 
225. 

Pike, General Z. M. Explores western 
country, 629. 

Pinckney, General C. C. Commissioner to 
France, 541, 548. Candidate for presidency, 
562, 630. Upon Jefferson's administration, 
633. 

Pintard, John. Resigns clerkship, 432. 

Pitt, William. Exempts Jefferson's baggage 
from the duties, 341. In conference with 
Adams, 404. With G. Morris,^408. 

Plymouth, Mass. Incident at, 145. 

Politeness. Importance of, 430. 

Port Bill, Boston, 129 to 133. 

Portsmouth, N.H. Aids Boston, 132. 

Price, Dr. Richard. Calls forth Burke's 
reflections, 417. 

Price, Mr. His duel with Eacker, 659. 

Priestley, Dr. Joseph. Jefferson recom- 
mends to students, 61. Jefferson to, on 
classi(!al education, 216. His house de- 
stroyed, 477, 496. His life in England, 497. 
Removes to America, 499. Jefferson at- 
tends his church, 530. Menaced by Alien 
Law, 551. Preaches in Philadelphia, 574. 
Jefferson invites and commends, 5S9. Jef. 
ferson consults ou the University, 704. 

Primogeniture. Abolished in Va., 214. 

Prisoners of war. How treated in Revolu- 
tionary War, 234, 235, 236. 

Protective System. Before the Revolution, 



109, 275. Struggles to destroy, 277. Jef- 
ferson opposes in France, 292, 340. Eng- 
land devoted to, 414. Complicated, 630. 

Providence, R.I. Commerce of, before Rev- 
olution, 108. Men of, burn the Gaspee, 
112 to 116. Aids Boston, 132. 

Purdie, Hugh. Barbarity to, 416. 

Quebec. Sends aid to Boston, 131. 

Quincy, Josiah. Quoted on Merry's recep- 
tion, 619. Opposes purchase of Louisiana, 
654. On Jefferson's retirement, 684. 

Radicals. Remarks upon, 207. 

Raglan, Lord, 191. 

R.ileigh Tavern. Scenes in, 34, 119. 

Randall, Henry S. Quoted upon Peter Jef- 
ferson, 8. Upon Jefferson's habits, 43. 
Upon his law-practice, 81. Upon Mrs. 
Carr, 125. Upon Jefferson's skill in music, 
222. Upon Jefferson's exactness, 314. Up- 
on his welcome home, 345. Upon T. M. 
Randolph, 504. Upon treatment of the 
slaves at Monticello, 508. Defends Jeffer- 
son, 569. Relates anecdotes of Jefferson's 
simple manners, 624. Furtiishes reminis- 
cences of Jefferson's grand-daughters, 714. 
Upon raising money for Jefferson, 731. 

Randolph, Edmund. At college, 25. Jeffer- 
son gets books for, 304. Appointed attor- 
ney-general, 380. Described, 330. Hamil- 
ton to, on the French Revolution, 456. His 
opinion on privateering, 481. On Genet, 
488. Jefferson to, on the pardoning power, 
632. 

Randolph, George Wythe, 570. 

Randolph, Isham. His lineage and character, 
4, 7. 

Randolph, John. Att'y-gen. of Va. Sella 
violin to Jefferson, 176. Jefferson to, on 
public affairs, 177, 180. 

Randolph, John, of Roanoke. Upon Jeffer- 
son, 210. Toasts Martha Jefferson, 401. 
Goes into opposition, 607. Eulogizes Jef- 
ferson's administration, 613. 

Randolph, Martha Jefferson. Born, 107. 
Anecdote of, as a child, 128. Upon the 
death of her mother, 265. Jefferson ad- 
vises, 274. To Paris, 277, 280. At school 
in Paris, 330, 332. Rescued from a convent, 
333, 334. Engaged to be married, 334. 
Return home, 3i4. Married, 346. Jeffer- 
son to, on birth of a child, 400. On the 



INDEX. 



761 



marriage of her father-in-law, 401. Jeffer- 
son to, on Lake George, 425. Jefferson to, 
on party violence, 555. Refutes the Dusky 
Sally slander, 570. Lives at Monticello, 
68S. Her disposition, 693. Her death, 736. 

Randolph, Colonel Peter. Anecdote of, 66. 

Randolph, Peyton. Revered by Jefferson, 
30. Anecdote of, 66. Elected speaker of 
House of Burgesses, 90. On committee of 
correspondence, 124. Presents Jefferson's 
draught of instructions, 142. Proscribed in 
England, 142. Elected to Continental Con- 
gi'ess, 143. Chairman of it, 151. Quiets 
the people, 153. Induces troops to return 
home, 154. Induces Jefferson to reply to 
North, 158. In Congress, 163. Reelected, 
172. Retires from public life, 174. 

Randolph, Colonel T. J. Quoted upon the 
Dusky Sally slander, 569. Anecdote of his 
youth, 624. Describes Jefferson's labors 
for the university, 706. 

Randolph, Thomas Mann. In Paris, 334. 
Engaged to Martha Jefferson, 334. Mar- 
ries her, 346. Marriage of his father, 401. 
His impetuosity, 504. His opinions respect- 
ing slavery, 694. His translation from the 
Greek, 697. 

Randolph, William, 4. 

Reid, Lieutenant. His vessel burnt, 111. 

Religion set free in Va., 210, 211. Effect of it 
in France, 311. Jefferson advises nephew 
respecting, 338. His opinions on, 711, 712, 
744. 

Reynolds, James. Extorts money from Ham- 
ilton, 536, 538. 

Reynolds, Mrs. James. Her amour with 
Hamilton, 535. 

Rhode Island. People of, before the Revolu- 
tion, 110. Accepts Independence, 193. Jef- 
ferson's remarks upon, 339. 

Rice. Jefferson sends varieties of, to U. S., 
307, 308, 309. 

Richmond, Va. Convention at, in 1775, 149. 
Becomes capital of Va., 213, 238. Public 
buildings at, 305. 

Riedesel, General. A prisoner in Va., 221, 
228. Liberality to his troops, 223. 

Riedesel, Madame. Her residence inVa., 221. 
Her habits, 223, 228. 

Rittenhouse, David. With Franklin on the 
Delaware, 181. Jefferson employs, 221. 
Witnesses an experiment, 398. Receives 
Genet, 471. 



Rivanna River, 2. Improved by Jefferson, 
42. 

Rives, William O. Quoted upon violin, 12. 
Upon Jefferson's plough, 507. 

Robinson, Crabb. Quoted upon good com- 
pany, 164. 

Rochefoucauld, Due de la. Visits Monti- 
cello, 503. 

Rogers, Samuel. Anecdote of, 193. 

Rolfe, John. Plants first tobacco in Va., 72. 

Roswell, Va. Described, 36. 

Rush, Dr. Benjamin. Jefferson to, on the 
message system, 623. 

Rutland, Vt. Aids Boston, 132. 

Rutledge, Edward. In Congress, 164. Jef. 
ferson to, on rice, 308. 

Rutledge, John. In Congress, 164. His 
draught rejected, 168. Jefferson to, on Eu- 
ropean governments, 289. 

Sabin, Mr. On the burning of the Gaspee,- 
117. 

St. Clair, General Arthur. Defeated, 413, 
416. 

St. John, The. Fired into at Newport, 111. 

Salaries. Insufficient, paid by U. S., 286. 

Salem, Mass. Aids Boston in 1774, 132. 

Saratoga Springs. In early days, 425. 

Saxe- Weimar, Duke of. Relates visit to Mon- 
ticello, 724. 

Scott, Sir Walter. Admired James Watt, 
374. Jefferson upon, 713. 

Secession. Jefferson's argument against, 555. 

Shadwell farm. "Why so named, 5. Charged 
with support of Jefferson's mother and 
sisters, 31. House burnt, 98. 

Sedgwick, Catharine. Quoted upon her fa- 
ther, 373. 

Sedgwick, Theodore. His arrogance, 373. 
Quoted, 394. Hamilton to, on John xidams, 
562. 

Sedition Law, The. Described, 552. Jeffer- 
son's opinion of, 553, 679. 

Selma, Ala. Why so named, 40. 

Sessions, Darius. In affair of the Gaspee, 
111 to 115. 

Shard, Julius, 104. 

Sheep. Imported by Jefferson, 626. 

Sheridan, General P. H. Protects Univerai- 
ty of Virginia, 710. 

Sherman, Ro^er. In Congress, 164, 187. 
Signs treaty of peace, 269. 

Shippen, Dr. Inoculates Jefferson, 67. 



T62 



INDEX. 



Short, "William. Beloved by Jefferson, 270. 
In Paris with Jefferson, 324, 333. ChargS 
at Paris, 335, 3-10. Jefferson to, on the 
French Revolution, 456. On selling his 
stock, 494. Jefferson recalls, 609. 

Simcoe, Colonel. His proclamation, 515. 

Skeiton, Martha. Marries Jefferson, 101. 

Slavery. In Jefferson's boyhood, 11. Ab- 
horred by George Wythe, 31. In Va., 55. 
Jefferson's bill concerning, in House of 
Burgesses, 97. Opposition to, in the colo- 
nies, 139. A cause of terror in times of civ- 
il commotion, 152. Denounced in draught 
of Declaration of Independence, 189, 190. 
Remarks upon, 199. Jefferson's scheme to 
abolish, 218. Jefferson denounces, in his 
Notes on Va., 260. Jefferson moves to pre- 
vent, in N. W. territory, 270. His remarks 
upon, in Paris, 336. 

Sloane, Hans, 5. 

Slodtz, A. His Diana, 315. 

Small, Dr. William. Instructs Jefferson, 24, 
26, 30. Removes to Birmingham, 31. Jef- 
ferson to, on Lexington, 156. 

Smith, Dr. John B. Converses with Mazzci, 
572. 

Smith, Mrs. E. Vale. Quoted on marine spo- 
liation, 518, Upon Algerine piracies, 636. 

Smith, Rev. Cotton Mather. Slanders Jeffer- 
son, 668. 

Smith, Robert. Appointed secretary of the 
navy, 599. Why, 600. 

Sotith Carolina. Aids Boston, 131. 

Springfield, Mass. Aids Boston in 1774, 132. 

Stamp Act. Opposition to, in Va., 63, 64, 65. 

Story, Rev. Isaac. Jefferson to, on religion, 
744. 

State Rights. Lighten the question of, 259. 

Stiles, Dr. Ezra. Jefferson to, on a flower, 
309. 

Stratford upon Avon. Visited by Jefferson 
and Adams, 314. 

Strikers. Their operations described, 540, 547. 

Stone, William. In Congress, 163. 

Sullivan, General. Sends moose to Jefferson, 
310. 

Swartwout, John. His duel with Clinton, 
658. 

TAiLEYRAND, Prince. Upon Hamilton, 431. 
In X T Z affair, 545, 54S. *In negotiation 
for cession of Louisiana to U. S., 646. 

Talon, M. At Philadelphia, 477. 



Tammany Society, of Baltimore. Anecdote 
of, 610. 

Taney, Roger. Describes Luther Martin, 666. 

Tarlton, Colonel Baunastre. Seizes Monti- 
cello, 252. . I 

Taylor, John. To Jefferson on secession, ] 
555. 

Ternant, M. At Philadelphia, 458. 

Thackeray, W. M. Quoted, 379, 614. 

Threshing Machine. Where invented, 506. 

Tickuor, George. Quoted upon Talleyrand, 
431. 

Tie, The. Between Jefferson and Burr, 576. 

Tobacco. Use of, disapproved in Va., 27. 
Clergy paid in, 55. Culture of, in Va., 72, 
Fr.auds upon, 74. Exportation of, forbid- 
den, 144.' Monopoly of, in France, 292. 

Townscnd, Charles. Quoted upon British 
policy, 85. 

Township system. Jefferson upon, 674. 

Tracy, Nathaniel. To Europe with Jefferson, 
279. 

Tripoli. Negotiations with, in 1786, 299. 

Trist, N. P. Quoted upon breach between ■' 
Hamilton and Madison, 391. Upon Jeffer- ' 
son's regard for Madison, 594. Governor 
T. M. Randolph's letters to, 694. At death- 
bed of Jefferson, 733. 

Troup, Colonel Robert. Takes Hamilton's . 
law business, 377. 2 

Tucker, Professor George. Upon tobacco- -1 
rollers of Va., 201. Upon Jefferson's ap- ic 
pointment policy, 608. 

Tunis, Bey of. His conversation with Eaton, 
638. 

Tuscany, Duke of. Refuses a loan, 227, 228. 

Twain, Mark. Quoted, 574. 

University of Virginia. Founded by Jef- 

son, 703. 

Van Buren, Martin. Quoted upon G. Mor- ' 
ris at Washington, 3C8. 

V.ans Murray, William. Goes as minister to 
France, 561. 

Venable, Dr. Charles. Describes University 
of Virginia, 708. 

Vergennes, Count de. Advises the Ameri- 
can commissioners in 1784, 282. Receives 
Jefferson, 283. Conferences with him, 292. 

Vermont. Sends aid to Boston, 132. Jef-'s 
ferson visits, in 1791, 426. 

Vestryman. The oath of, in Va., 69. i 



INDEX. 



763 



tor, Lieut-General. Appointed to com- 
land in Louisiana, 647. 
:oennes. Taken by Clarke, 234, 23T. 
lin. The. Its use in Virginia, 12. Jeflfer- 
m plays, 27, 28, 34, 37. Saved from the 
■arning house, 98. Odd compact for one, 
, 5. Jefferson's skill upon, 222. Deprived 
f, 314. 

t^inia. The ancient sports of, 12. Schools 
, in early days, 14. Its ancient capital, 
I. Habits of, 27. Early gambling in, 29. 
Vo choice of occupations in, 32. Early laws 
■f, 51, 52. Clergy In olden time, 56, 57, 58. 
obacco culture in, 73. Legislature of, 82. 
1 accord with Mass., 85. Reception of Lord 
""ototourt, 86. Dependent upon Great Brit- 
ain for manufactures, 95. Winter in, 101, 
1.04. Attached to mouarchy, 120. And to 
herty, 122. Aids Boston, 131. Elects mem- 
•ers of Continental Congress, 143. Pays 
•r members liberally, 162. Menaced with 
devastation in 1775, 183. Its' admirable 
legislature, 184. Decides for independence, 
"S6, 187. Her ancient laws reformed by 
Jefferson, 199. An election in, described, 
a)0. Witchcraft in, 202. During first years 
of Revolutionary War, 220. Hessian pris- 
oners in, 221, 223. Ratifies treaty as a sov- 
reign state, 229. Ravaged by Arnold, 
46. By CornwaUis, 258. Notes upon, by 
jfferson, 260. Farming in, 501, 502. 
"ney, Compte de. Flies from AUen Law, 
551, 590. 
/oltaire. Upon execution of Damiens, 135. 
Interested in American Revolution, 146. 
Upon anvil and hammer, 288. Upon fish in 
Lent, 307. Upon Newton, 489. Knew the 
Gallatins, 595. 

Walsh, Robert. G. Morris to, on Hamil- 
ton, 450. 

Wanton, Joseph. In affair of the Gaspee, 
111 to 115. 

vV^ard, General Artemas. Knox, his aid-de- 
camp, 378. 

Washington, Augustine. Consulted by Boston 
•ommiltee, 132. 

'shington, D.C. Selection of the site, 393. 
'jaid out, 399. Government removed to, 
600. Described, 601. 

vV ishington, George. In the field after Brad- 
dock's defeat, 15. Project of his going to 
sea before the mast, 32. Upon frauds in 



London, 77. In House of Burgesses, 89, 94. 
Elected to Continental Congress, 144, 145. 
On committee to arm Va., 150. Command- 
er-in-chief, 161. Hears of Bunker liiU, 162. 
Thanked by Burgesses of Va., 172. Decides 
to release Henry Hamilton, 236. Jefferson 
to, on danger of Va. in 1781 , 251. Resign- 
ing his commission, 269. Foretells the Erie 
canal, 272, 273. Upon the draught of the 
commercial treaty of 1784, 232. Wrong to 
refuse pay, 286. Jefferson to, from France, 
288. Jefferson to, on the Kings, 316. Ap- 
points Jefferson secretary of state, 345. 
Dangerous illness in 1790, 350. Quoted on 
need of efficient government, 351. His re- 
lations with Hamilton, 354. Etiquette dur- 
ing his presidency, 365, 367. Resents fa- 
miliarity, 309. Beginning of his presidency, 
376. Carlyle upon, 382. Sends O. Morris 
to England, 408. Paine dedicates pamphlet 
to, 422. Lear to, on Painc's pamphlet, 424. 
adulation of, 434. Endeavors to reconcile 
Jefferson and Hamilton, 442, 447, 450. On 
Virginia overseers, 453. Urges Jefferson to 
accept mission to France, 459. In Genet 
affair, 464. Receives Genet, 478. His an- 
ger at a caricature, 489. Comj)liments Jef- 
ferson on his retiring, 492. Invites Jeffer- 
son to return to cabinet, 510. Signs Jay 
treaty, 517. To Jefferson on Lee's charges, 
521. Retires from presidency, 529, 530. 
Urged by Hamilton to return, 562. Galla- 
tin describes, 596. 

Washington, Mrs. Martha. Her workroom 
at Mt. Vernon, 11. To Mrs. Jefferson on 
ladies aiding Revolution, -Ml. Her arrival 
in New York in 1789, 367. Detested demo- 
crats, 522. 

Washington, Mrs. Mary. Thinks of sending 
George to sea before the mast, 3J. 

Watson, Elkanah. Quoted upon a Virginia 
election, 200. 

Watt, James, 25. His steam-engine invented, 
303. Admires Sir Walter Scott, 374. 

Wayles, John. His estate, 100. Jefferson 
marries his daughter, 101. Death, 103. 

Webster, Daniel. Quoted upon lawyers, 
73. Upon Hamilton, 352, 384. Relates visit 
to Monticello, 722. Assists Mrs. Madison, 
742. 

Webster, Noah. Begins copyright in U.S., 
304. 

WeUs, Me. Aids Boston, 132. 



764 



INDEX. 



"Wethersfield, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 

Witchcraft. In Va., 54, 202. 

Wheelbarrows. Jefferson's experiments 
with, 104. 

Whittier, J. G. How defrauded, 630. 

Wilkinson, General. Reveals Burr's project, 
665. 

Willard, Dr. Joseph. Jefferson corresponds 
with, 280. 

William and Mary College. Jefferson enter- 
ing, 1. Early history, 21, 23. Jefferson 
proposes to enlarge, 216, He reforms, 238. 
Desires to unite it with University of Vir- 
ginia, 704. 

Williamsburg, Va. Described, 20. Gayety 
in, 35. Situation of, 42. Scenes at, in early 
day, 94. Powder seized at, 162, 159. Polite 
to naval officers, 158. Ceases to be the capi- 
tal, 213, 238. Washington a copy of, 399. 

Williams, Roger. Instructed by Coke, 47. 

Windham, Ct. Aids Boston, 130. 

Wine. Spoils gayety, 56. 

Wirt, William. Quoted upon Dabney Carr, 
45. Upon Jefferson and Mirabeau, 325. 



Upon Edmund Randolph, 380. In trial of 
Burr, 669. 

Wistar, Dr. Caspar. Witnesses an experi- 
ment, 393. 

Wolcott, Oliver. Quoted upon Jefferson, 435. 

Wrentham, Mass. Aids Boston, 130. 

Wright's Perry. Proposed as site for capital 
of U.S., 393, 394. 

Wj'the, George. Early friend of Jefferson, 
29, 30. Emancipates his slaves, 31. Re- 
fused to sign Patrick Henry's Ucense, 33. 
In acco'rd with Jefferson in 1774, 141. Sup- 
plies Washington with statistics, 145. 
Elected to Congress, 172. Attests violin 
compact, 176. Devises seal for Va., 193, 
194. Consults John Adams upon govern- 
ment, 196. Aids to reform Va., 208. Re- 
vises the laws, 215. Jefferson to, on France, 
288. On freedom of religion, 311. Assists 
to prepare Jefferson's Manual, 527. Be- 
queaths his Ubrary to Jefferson, 730. 

Wythe, Mrs. Her mixture of wines, 105. 

X T Z Affair, 545. 



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